They strolled back uptown to Karp’s place. The air remained warm and not as humid as it would be later in the summer. Marlene went into an all-night emporium and bought, over his protests, a metal wastebasket with the Statue of Liberty and other New York scenes printed on it.
Toward dawn, they were in bed, pumping each other to yet another Big O. Remarkable how Marlene, filthy mouthed in the office, in deepest sex would say only “oh gosh” and “oh dear” like a barely fallen Carmelite. Now, though, she was even passed the “oh gosh” stage, sweating and flushed, her head lashing back and forth across the pillow like the tail of a harpooned eel, at which point the telephone rang. Around the sixth ring, the sound penetrated into Karp’s brain. He let ten more rings go by, until he realized both that the phone was not going to stop and that he was conditioned, like Pavlov’s dog, to stop what he was doing, no matter what, and answer a ringing phone.
“Sorry, I got to answer that,” he gasped.
“Sure, yeah. But make it snappy,” said Marlene.
He rolled off and picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”
“Karp, is that you?”
“No, it’s Henry Kissinger. Who is this?”
“Butch, it’s me, Sonny Dunbar. I been trying to get you all night.”
“Well, you got me now. This better be good, Sonny.”
“No, it’s bad, real bad. Donny’s dead.”
“Dead? When … what happened?”
“They called us from Vorland about ten-thirty. He was dead in his cell at bed check. They think he got hold of some dope and OD’d. I’m over at his house-we just got my sister to bed. I still can’t believe it, you know? Anyway, I thought you better hear about it.”
“Thanks, Sonny. Look, I’m sorry as hell about this … let’s talk later, see where we stand.”
Karp hung up and flopped back on the pillow. He hadn’t thought about Mandeville Louis and Donald Walker for some time. He was carrying a full caseload now; it was hard enough to keep abreast of current cases, not to mention the strain of the Garrahy campaign. Tomorrow he would have to pull the file and rethink the case. But these thoughts were interrupted by a small, warm hand gliding down his belly to his groin.
“Ding-dong! Remember me?”
“Oh, yeah. Where was I?”
“Right here. Just a little higher. Ahh, that’s marvelous,” she said. But he couldn’t get Donald Walker’s frightened face out of his mind. That man was scared shitless, he thought, and he was right.
At the office the next day, Karp felt sleepy and sated, and found himself staring out the window at nothing. Shortly after noon, Sonny Dunbar came into his office, looking ashen and drawn.
“Pretty rough, huh?” said Karp. “You feel like going for coffee or a drink?”
“Nah, I got coffee up the wazzoo.”
“OK, what’s the story?”
Dunbar told a fairly common tale, but a sad one nonetheless. Donald Walker had drawn three-to-five for his role in the Marchione killings. Because he had no record of violence-and because Karp put in a good word-he was sent to the minimum-security facility at Vorland, in the Hudson Valley, about ninety minutes out of the city.
At Vorland, he was supposed to receive therapy and rehabilitation in the company of other young men who had gotten into trouble but were not regarded as dangerous, and whose crimes did not seem to warrant a ticket to the hell of Attica.
Or so it was supposed to work. Because of the peculiar distinction the law makes between adult and juvenile offenders, many individuals in Vorland’s population had half a dozen years of ferocious criminality behind them when their slates were wiped clean on their eighteenth birthdays. They may have been adult first offenders, but they were hardly simple lads in their first bit of trouble.
Besides that, Vorland had been designed for a high ratio of correction officers to inmates. That ratio was consumed-like so many other good ideas-by the implacable grinding of the criminal justice machine. Vorland had twice as many inmates as it had been designed for. It was better than the Tombs; it was better than Attica, but that wasn’t saying much. It was also one of the easiest places in the state of New York to cop drugs. The prison dealers just got on the phone and arranged for a friend to take a pleasant drive upstate, take a stroll along the eight-foot chain-link fence that bounded the facility, and flip a package over the top at a prearranged time and place.
Apparently Donald Walker had gotten a phone call the previous evening. It was from a woman claiming to be his sister; this was later discovered to be a lie. Walker had talked with her for a few minutes and the next day had been seen walking near the fence in the area known to the inmates as the Holy Land, because of the good things that fell out of the sky. By nine that evening he was dead, his belt around his arm, an empty syringe sticking in his vein.
“The little jerk,” Dunbar went on, “he was clean for most of a year and then he goes and pulls a dumb trick the first time somebody, some ‘friend’ lays some shit on him. Go figure!”
“You know what they say, ‘when the needle goes in, it never comes out.’ Any lead on the supplier?”
“Who the fuck knows? Could be anybody-a friend of a friend …”
“I’m thinking who might want him dead.”
“Who, that what’s-his-face, Louis? He’s still in the funny farm, right?”
“Right. But he could have set it up.”
“Come on, Karp. You been reading too many books. The mob maybe does stuff like that. We’re talking a mutt, a shooter, with no organization, no record. Besides, he’s still nailed-you still got the old lady and the gun, the other evidence too.”
“Yeah, but Donny was the linchpin. And, you know something? I’m not so sure that Mr. Louis is such a mutt. This bastard, I don’t know, he stinks, from the word go. There’s wheels within wheels going on there. Look, Sonny, I think it’s important that we try to find the third man.”
“What third man? The other guy in the car? Give me a break, Karp. It’s been near two goddamn years. How’m I going to start looking? Walk down Lenox Avenue, bracing dudes: ‘Say, scuse me bro’, you happen to be in a car somewheres back in Nineteen-seventy with a guy who wasted a coupla honkies in a liquor store? No? Well, have a nice day.’ Fuck me, Jack! You know how many cases I’m holding?”
“OK, Sonny, don’t get your balls in an uproar. Just a suggestion. We got the gun, we’ll go with that. On the other hand, you stumble on something, give me a call, OK? I want this shithead bad.”
“I can tell that. It’ll have to be stumble though, I’m warning you. Meanwhile, I got to go to a funeral.”
After Dunbar left, Karp leafed through his beautiful file on the Marchione case. He had his doubts. An old lady witness on a dark street. A gun. Some bits of glass. Juries liked eyewitnesses, despite their notorious unreliability. Sussman would tear this shit apart- without Donald Walker to weave it together.
Karp got up and stretched. He decided to go down to the evidence locker to check over some material from a case he was preparing for presentation to the bureau on Friday. Karp liked to physically handle the evidence. He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but the sight and feel of the guns, knives, chemicals, and blunt instruments with which New Yorkers ended one another’s lives enriched his presentation of a case. For the same reason, he forced himself to visit the morgue and look at the victims. Also, there was always the chance, however slight, that something would pop out at him from the dreadful stuff and change the meaning of a case.
In the evidence locker Proud Mary was looking glum.
“What’s happening, Mary?”
“I swear, Karp, that Guma ever come by me again I better not have no gun, or no knife in my hand. It took me the whole damn day to straighten out the mess you all made. Gettin’ stuff back in the right boxes, fixin’ tags … damn, I musta been pure crazy givin’ him my key.”