Robert Tanenbaum: Irresistible Impulse

“Butch!” called the tinny voice. “Pick up! It’s me.”

Karp reached a long arm over and lifted the receiver.

“Marlene! How are you this fine morning? Want to talk to your sons? Boys, it’s Mommy.”

“I saw the TV. What happened?”

“What happened? Mr. Rohbling was declared not guilty by reason of insanity by a jury of his peers, is what happened. How are you, dear?”

“We’re fine. I’m coming home.”

“No kidding? What about your client?”

“That’s finished. The guy’s dead.”

“Well, that’ll teach him not to mess with my wife,” said Karp.

“Are you all right?” asked Marlene nervously. She might be doped up, but there was something about her husband’s tone she did not like.

“Never better,” said Karp.

“You’re not depressed?”

“I was depressed, but now I’m fine. I am also no longer the Homicide Bureau chief.”

“Jack fired you? The bastard!”

“Not at all. The fact is, I bet the farm on this one, and I got whipped, fair and square. He warned me he would have to cream my butt if we lost, and he did, with his usual Irish charm. I am going to be the Special Assistant to the District Attorney for Special Projects.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Nothing. A job with no responsibilities and a low, low profile. With a paycheck, however.”

“Jesus, Butch! What will you do? ”

“I don’t know. I think I’ll spend some time hanging around here with the kids. This motherhood racket is a piece of cake. I don’t know why women complain all the time. Yeah, maybe I’ll just hang loose and do my toenails, and read Goodnight Moon and let you shoot all the bad guys. By the way, did you whack this latest guy personally, or did that fall to one of your minions?”

“A minion. Butch, are you really okay? You sound, I don’t know, kind of wacky.”

Karp considered this seriously for a moment, while he licked, nuzzled, and otherwise amused his children. Then he said, “I guess, what it is, when you stretch the rubber band far enough and then let it snap back, it tends to get a little tangled. I made a big mistake, and I should pay the freight. To tell the absolute truth, I feel like somebody just lifted a Mosler safe off my chest. I mean, it’s been years since I haven’t been worrying about something, fighting something, stressed out to the max. You know?”

“Yeah, I do,” she said, with feeling.

“And Roland and Guma took me out last night to commiserate, and Roland was the one who got hammered, because even though he’s such an ambitious bastard, he still felt bad about the trial.”

“And he’ll pick up the bureau.”

“I expect so. God knows he’s lusted after it long enough. And he’ll do a good job. I’ll tell you something, Marlene, when the foreman stood up there-he was that NYU professor I put in there, the alternate-and read the verdict, I felt this incredible sense of relief. Do you think I set all this up? Insisting on running this trial. Just to get a rest?”

“It wouldn’t completely stun me if it was true,” said Marlene. “I saw Lionel T. on the tube, by the way, pontificating, Apparently, justice was done.”

“Maybe it was,” said Karp. “Rohbling’s going somewhere where he won’t have much access to elderly black ladies, maybe not for twenty-five to life, but a good long time. I will say Waley was gracious in victory. A real gentleman, and a lesson in how to run a trial. But I’ll get him next time.”

“That’s my old Butch!” said Marlene. “Speaking of getting, I have a suggestion for your first special project.”

“I’ll entertain it.”

She described her recent contacts with Vincent Robinson and what he had done to her. Karp was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, in quite a different, a sterner voice, “I think it’s time Dr. Robinson was suppressed.”

“On what charge, Counselor?” asked Marlene.

Karp laughed, a muffled sound, because Zak was trying to sit on his face. “Oh, charges! This is Special Projects, honey. We don’ need no stinkin’ charges.”

Karp had a nice office to go with his new job, one just down the hall from the district attorney’s, with the old-fashioned sort of furniture and a good three-window view. Its former occupant was a man named Conrad Wharton, who had been, under the ancien regime , one of Karp’s most implacable enemies. Sitting in Wharton’s special oversize chair, behind Wharton’s special oversize rosewood desk, made Karp prone to unwonted fits of giggles.

It was now four days after the verdict in the Rohbling trial. The press had gone on to other things, as had the militants. Karp was cheerily back at work, a rested, smiling Karp, a different man from the fearsome, hulking scowler he had lately been, and already launching his first special project.

To this end he had called a meeting in the D.A.’s conference room. Around the long oak table sat those interested in the malefactions of Dr. Vincent Fiske Robinson: Paul Menotti, the U.S. attorney, more grumpy than usual at finding himself off his own turf; Cynthia Doland, his lovely shadow, crisp and demure in a pale off-white linen suit; V.T. Newbury, representing Fraud; Lieutenant Clay Fulton, in charge of investigating the murder of Margaret Evans, in which Robinson was a suspect; and Karp, at the head of the table.

Karp said, “We’re still waiting for one more person, but I think we can get started. Lieutenant Fulton will bring us up to date on the status of the investigation. Clay?”

Fulton took a cheap memo pad out of his breast pocket, thumbed through it, and began. After sketching in his surveillance of Robinson the previous winter and what it had yielded, he moved on to the more fruitful recent inquiries.

“First, we know Robinson was in town on the night Margaret Evans was murdered. He was club hopping off a yacht. They docked at City Island, where a stretch limo met them and took them into Manhattan, and carried them from place to place. We interviewed most of the party. Some say Robinson was there with them throughout; others think he might have slipped away for a while with a woman named Virginia Wooten. What I gather from their accounts was that everyone was doped or drunk enough that they wouldn’t have noticed an elephant wandering away for a couple of hours.”

“What does this Wooten woman say?” Menotti asked.

“I don’t know because we haven’t had a chance to talk with her. She seems to have disappeared.” He paused to let this sink in. “On the other hand,” he continued, “she could be anywhere and show up tomorrow. They don’t call these folks the jet set for nothing. Moving to the victim: Margaret Evans was a medical-records specialist responsible for, among other things, the pharmaceutical records at the St. Nicholas Medical Centers dispensary on Amsterdam Avenue and One-oh-fifth Street. She’d been working there for eight years, and her colleagues considered her a good worker. A decent, honest woman, one of them said. On the night she died … hello, Marlene.”

Marlene paused at the door, then walked in. Karp introduced her as a private detective with some special knowledge of Vincent Robinson. “Ms. Ciampi has agreed to help us out pro bono ,” said Karp. “Marlene, I think you know everyone but Paul Menotti from the A.G. and his assistant, Cynthia Doland.” Marlene shook hands and sat down.

Fulton continued from where he had left off. “On the night she died, Evans made herself dinner and ate it alone. At about ten-thirty she opened the door to the people who killed her. No signs of forced entry. I say people, because one of them was a woman. She left some short blond hairs in the apartment. A man out walking his dog noticed a couple he hadn’t seen around before walking out of Evans’s building around eleven. He wasn’t close enough to get a good ID, but it was definitely a man and a woman. Both blonds. So it certainly would’ve been possible for Robinson and this woman Wooten to travel uptown, get into Evans’s apartment on some excuse-I mean, he was the victim’s boss, practically-kill her, and get away downtown without being missed by a bunch of dopers.”