Karp walked out of the bathroom, naked. “Hair in the drain? Drano? Does this mean the romance has gone already?” He bent over and nuzzled her neck. She shivered. “Nah, it just means-ahh, that’s so fine! — it just means we should get ready for new and startling levels of intimacy.” She held his head between her hands and stared into his eyes. “We’re in pretty deep and there’s a lot we don’t know about each other.”
“Especially me,” agreed Karp. “I mean sometimes you really whack me out, Marlene. I mean the stuff you pull. It scares me. You just decide to, I don’t know, disappear, or join the circus or something. You know?”
“Yeah, I know. You want me to be calm, so you can admire my beauty in peace. Like this.” She draped the towel over her head and struck a Mona Lisa pose. “I mean I know I’m easy on the eye. Shit, I’ve been hearing that since I was six. I know about the advantages of being attractive. But in a way, I hate it. It’s like what V.T. says about being rich. Is it me that’s desirable, or is it the other stuff, the money or the face? I mean, to a freak or a poor son of a bitch that’s looney, right? But there it is. My innermost fear.”
“It’s you,” said Karp, taking the hair dryer and the brush out of her hands. “Just you.”
She lay back and flung the towel down. “It better be, Buster.”
Chapter 17
“Karp, I keep getting your mail. When are you going to tell the mail room you moved?”
Marlene had come into his office a little before noon and dropped a pile of envelopes on his desk. “I’ll get around to it, Marlene. I’ve been really busy.”
“I guess that means we’re not going to lunch today.”
“I guess it does.”
She sidled around to his side of the desk, bent over, and licked his ear. He pulled away and gave her his long-suffering look. “Marlene, I got to do all this stuff.” He gestured at the piles of forms, computer printouts, and other paperwork on his desk.
She backed away, her face hardening. “Well, excuse me, Mr. Boss. I beg your pardon. I guess I’ll just climb back into my faucet until the next time you turn on the goddamn tap.”
“Come on, Marlene, give me a break. Look, I appreciate you bringing the mail over and I’ll take care of the mail room today, OK?” He glanced down at the pile of envelopes.
“Hey, Marlene, these are all opened.”
“So? I just want to see what you’re up to. You mind?”
“Yeah, I fucking well mind! Where the hell do you get off opening my mail?”
“Why? You’ve got big secrets?”
“That’s not the point. You don’t open other people’s mail.”
“Oh, no? You think it’s too personal? You spent last night licking my ovaries, and I can’t peek at your personal correspondence. If you were banging your secretary, you’d let her peek at your personal correspondence, wouldn’t you?”
Karp got to his feet. “Marlene, what the hell has got into you?” he shouted. He realized she was picking a fight, but didn’t understand why.
“I would explain it to you, but it turns out I haven’t got the time.” She turned and stormed out, slamming the door and rattling the glass.
Karp slumped back in his seat and made some tooth marks on his pencil. The phone rang. It was Helen Simms, the bureau secretary.
“You all right in there? Nothing broken?”
“Yeah, Helen, it’s fine. Just fine.”
“You want to take this call I been holding. It’s a Mister Sussman.”
After a few initial pleasantries, Sussman got to the point, which was Mandeville Louis.
“Mister Karp, my client believes you have a personal animus against him. I confess, for myself, that I fail to see what you gain by not agreeing to an early disposition of this case, which is going on three years old now.”
“I don’t agree, Mister Sussman. Your client killed two people in cold blood. I want to put him in jail for a long time. That’s not personal, that’s my job.”
“Yes, of course. But you know very well that cases like Louis’s are usually settled expeditiously. The man as no criminal record. He is mentally ill. He can’t be tried. My God, can you imagine what would happen to the criminal justice system if every case of this type was blockaded in the way you seem intent on doing here? Surely Mister Bloom cannot approve. I had understood that he set quite a high priority on greasing the wheels of justice, so to speak.”
“Yeah, but first of all, it’s not every case. It’s one particular case, and second, I don’t believe Mister Louis is mentally ill.”
“Oh? Have you added a forensic psychiatric degree to your credentials?”
Karp was suddenly exhausted. All at once, his little stratagems and evasions, his training sessions, his back-breaking work, seemed utterly futile. Some part of his mind knew the problems he was having with Marlene were connected with the monumental, and-said one part of him-absurd task he had set himself. He was heading for an emotional crash and burn again. And for what? If the law could not punish a ravening wolf like Mandeville Louis, a villain standing ankle deep in blood and laughing about it, then what was the point of it all?
Moral fatigue had dulled Karp’s mind, and he did something foolish. He began telling Sussman what he and Dunbar suspected about Louis’s M.O. He wanted, he needed, the sleek defense lawyer to step out of his formal role as advocate and share Karp’s horror at what Louis had done and at the failure of the justice system to do much about it. Crazy, but true.
“And so, Mister Sussman,” Karp concluded, in his best summation-to-the jury style, “I am convinced that your client, far from being a mental incompetent who committed a single impulsive crime, is a cynical and extremely clever mass murderer who may have been responsible for as many as one hundred killings in the past ten years. He has been consciously manipulating the criminal justice system, and I have decided to put a stop to it. As long as I have any association with the District Attorney’s Office, Mandeville Louis will not cop to a lesser. He can sit in Matteawan as long as he likes. Meanwhile, the police will continue gathering evidence linking him to his other crimes.” This was a bluff. Karp knew he was lucky to get Dunbar to look for the third man. It would be virtually impossible to get the cops to open dozens of closed files.
Sussman, whose interest in justice was tenuous at best, remained unimpressed. “That was very interesting, Mister Karp. Now I’ll tell one. Once upon a time, a little girl named Red Riding Hood lived with her mommy in the middle of a big forest …”
“OK, Sussman, you made your point,” snapped Karp. “I don’t give two shits if you believe me or not. But, you ever feel like calling me again, let me say this. If your man decides to plead guilty to the top count of the indictment, I’m all ears. Other than that, save your dime.” He slammed down the receiver.
Leonard Sussman stared for a moment at the dead phone. Then he dialed a familiar number.
Louis was at arts and crafts when they called him to the phone. He was painting. Robert Fallon was teaching him how. Fallon joked about starting an atelier in the loony bin, to carry on his traditions after he departed for friendlier places. Fallon talked incessantly about escaping, about what he would do when he was free in South America. It was starting to get on Louis’s nerves. First of all, he thought Fallon was bullshitting. All the fucker did was eat. He’d need a guy with a forklift to escape. Louis was putting on weight, too, on the starchy food, but he knew he would never become one of the doughy creatures he saw every day in the lounge. He wondered why there were weight rooms in prisons but not in looney bins.