Robert Tanenbaum - Falsely Accused

Marlene looked at the address on her form, which was an application for a protective order. “Avenue D? I thought the guy had money. It must be a dump, in that neighborhood, right?”

“The pipeline,” said Harry.

Marlene stared at him. She was by now used to Bello’s habit of announcing a conclusion without any intervening explanation, the result of having worked the street for many years with a partner to whom he was exceptionally well tuned. Although she often found, to her surprise, that she could follow him in these logical leaps, this particular one left her baffled.

“What pipeline, Harry? What are you talking about?”

“Alaska. He worked there a couple, three years. Made about fifty K a year, didn’t spend a dime. No sheet. It was in the car.”

Marlene rapidly translated this into human speech. Harry had broken into Pruitt’s car and found some papers, probably old pay stubs, that had enabled him to make some phone calls. Harry was inarticulate by choice, not through defect; he could charm and bully people as the need arose with the best of them, and he had obviously wormed his information out of some clerk in Prudhoe Bay. And he’d run Pruitt’s name through the NIC computer and come up blank. Marlene imagined Pruitt wrestling giant pipes under the midnight sun, lost in a fantasy of reclaimed nonexistent love; she thought such a man unlikely to be seriously dismayed by a protective order. Nevertheless, that was the next step.

She collected her papers and stood up. “Thanks, Harry,” she said and kissed him on the cheek. “Let me go and file this, and we’ll see what happens.”

What happened was that a few days later Marlene received from a bored and harried judge a protection order forbidding Robert Pruitt from approaching or attempting to communicate with Carrie Lanin on pain of contempt of court, which event was duly celebrated by Marlene and her client with a delightful dinner at Rocco’s on Thompson Street; after which, Marlene, who had crashed heavily into sodden sleep, was awakened at a quarter to three in the morning by the phone ringing in her ear.

It was Carrie Lanin, crying and screaming by turns.

“Calm down, Carrie, I can’t understand what you’re saying,” Marlene said.

“What is it? Who’s that?” asked Karp, startled out of his own deep sleep.

“Carrie Lanin,” answered Marlene shortly, and then said into the phone, “Carrie, calm down and tell me what happened.”

“Christ, doesn’t she own a clock? It’s three in the morning,” Karp mumbled, and put a pillow over his head.

“ He was here !” Lanin sobbed. “You said it would be over, but he came here ! He sat on my bed and talked to me and stroked my fucking hair !”

Marlene felt her stomach roil, and a sour bubble of used food rose into her throat. She was out of practice, but she remembered how to suppress the empathy and get the facts from the vic. She sharpened her voice to penetrate the blubbering. “Did he assault you? Were you raped?”

“No! No, he just stroked me. He said … he said he was saving it for when we got married ! Oh, God, make this stop! I want my life back!”

More crying. Marlene relaxed slightly. If there wasn’t a rape, there was no immediate need to get Carrie Lanin picked up and packed off to a hospital rape center. “Carrie, listen to me. He broke in to your home at night. He touched you. That’s burglary and assault right there; plus he violated the protection order. We’ve got him. He’s going to jail.”

Lanin didn’t seem to hear. “He kept saying you were keeping us apart, like in high school. ‘Your snotty friends.’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t have done it, darling. Going to court. We can solve all our problems ourselves. You don’t need that bitch lawyer.’ I was paralyzed. I didn’t want to scream. I didn’t want to wake Miranda. God, can you imagine? What she’d think? The effect…? So I just let him talk. I played along with his crazy rap. I thought he might get violent.”

“You probably did the right thing,” said Marlene. “Look, from one point of view this is the best thing that could’ve happened-”

“Oh, right! It would even’ve been better if he’d raped me and carved his initials on my forehead. Then he would’ve gone away for a long time- maybe. What do really bad rapists get nowadays? Ten years?”

“About that. It depends,” Marlene replied, uncomfortable in the knowledge that, to judge from the statutory sentence ranges, the state of New York considered selling marijuana in bulk a lot more serious than first-degree rape. A really horrendous, violent rapist might draw six to eighteen, and be paroled right after the minimum, and people who raped women they knew, especially women of the same age and race and class, usually got a lot less. Or walked. But Marlene kept all that to herself, instead pumping assurances over the wire for all she was worth, ignoring for the moment the possibility that she would not be able to deliver on them. After forty minutes of this, she had calmed Lanin down enough to end the conversation in good conscience, with a promise that she’d see her in the morning.

Which was not that far off. Marlene could not fall back asleep and stared resentfully at Karp, who could and had, pillow still in place over his head. She rose, showered, dressed, made coffee, and drank it in her little office at the far end of the loft, watching dawn come up Crosby Street and listening to the late-night sounds of the City, the sirens, the occasional roar of a car, slowly build to the crescendo of a working day.

She was slow and stupid as she pressed through the morning chores. Karp was up and out early, with only a perfunctory word and a hurried kiss. He obviously had a full plate with the Selig case, and Marlene was reluctant to worry him with Carrie Lanin. And if she allowed herself to think about it, she was worried, because if ever she’d seen a ticking human grenade, it was Pruitt, and she’d seen a lot of them in her work, of the DAD KILLS MOM, TOTS, SELF variety, and she wanted to share the problem with Karp. That’s what marriage was for, in her opinion, or would be, were the marriage not between a basically cryptic and surreptitious woman and a man for whom the expression straight arrow might have been especially devised.

As she drove to the Lanin residence, she was therefore running through her head one of those fictitious conversations that are the chief barrier to actual communication between people married to each other. She told Karp what was going on, about her fears for Lanin, about her general frustration with a system that seemed incapable of protecting women from the lethal fantasies of certain men, about her fears of being sucked into a cycle of violence, about her inexplicable fascination with deadly risk. In her head, Karp answered logically, maddeningly obtuse: you know the law; some get away with it, some don’t; work inside the system; we’ve got our own lives to worry about; do what you can, but don’t go crazy. But what if doing what you can made you crazy? To that the mentalized Karp had no answer. Nor did Marlene.

Carrie Lanin was drunk when Marlene came to her door; it was clear that she hadn’t slept either, and she hadn’t spent the small hours calmly watching the dawn break. She looked at Marlene with a hard eye, her face saying, you should have saved me from this. And there was nothing Marlene could reply to this, except hollow, comforting banalities, as we do to a friend’s news of cancer.

Marlene dropped the kids off and went back to her loft to work the phone. The first person she called was Luisa Beckett, once something of a protégée of Marlene’s, and now in charge of sex crimes at the New York D.A.