Robert Tanenbaum: Falsely Accused

And that was not the worst. The same evening, Murray Selig sat with his wife, Naomi, in front of their television and watched a press conference in which first the Mayor and then the district attorney denounced him as an incompetent, and as someone with whom, in the Mayor’s words, “the most important district attorney in the city” could not work. Selig was therefore to be demoted to the rank of ordinary medical examiner. Selig sat quietly while this went on, as if in a trance, a stiff scotch in one hand and his wife’s hand in the other, until it was announced that he was to be replaced by one Harvey Kloss.

“Kloss!” screamed Selig. “That patzer! I wouldn’t hire him as a deiner on the graveyard shift!”

“Who is he?” asked Naomi Selig.

“Oh, he’s some putz from upstate, a pal of Bloom’s. Bloom was pushing him like crazy last year for my job-my ex-job, sorry. Not only does the guy not know what the hell he’s doing, but when Sandy Bloom says, ‘Shit,’ he says, ‘What color?’” He punched the power switch and flung the remote at the darkened screen.

“Breaking the TV is not going to help,” observed Mrs. Selig, and after a moment asked, “So what are you going to do about it?”

“What can I do? I got canned. At the end of the day it comes down to the Mayor signs the check.”

“And all the garbage they were saying just now about you? You’re going to let that just go by?”

Selig considered this, his face flushing. “No. I was defamed. That wasn’t true, what they said, but … God! I can’t figure it out.” He jumped to his feet and began pacing. “It’s like something went insane. I work for a year, I think I’m doing okay-I mean, there are the usual little squabbles, with the D.A.’s, with Health, but nothing serious, nobody says a word to me that anything’s seriously wrong, not the Mayor, not Bloom, not Fuerza, and now, boom! I’m out on my ass and they’re on television saying I’m some kind of bum.”

“It’s Bloom,” said Naomi definitively.

Selig stopped pacing. “Why do you say that? I never did anything to him.”

“It doesn’t matter. Look, Fuerza’s a nonentity who doesn’t roll over in his sleep without checking it out with His Honor. And, no offense, but the Mayor could care less about the M.E. You barely appear on his radar screen. If he moved on you, it was because Bloom made a stink and said you had to go.”

“But why?”

“Because Sandy Bloom’s a dickhead. He was a dickhead at Dalton forty years ago, and age hasn’t improved him.”

Selig stared at his wife. She rarely used salty language, and when she did, it meant that she was very angry indeed.

“You knew Bloom in high school?”

“Prep school we called it, little yiddisheh aristocrats that we were. Yes, I knew him. I even dated him once, my freshman year. No, don’t ask! The point is, he developed a problem with you for some reason, and in typical Sandy fashion, instead of coming to you like a mensch and talking it out, he engineered this ream job. Well, we’re not going to let him get away with it.”

Naomi Selig had enormous black eyes, and as she said this they flashed sparks, and her bony jaw became set in a grim line. She was a small, tightly knit woman with a perpetual tan and a thick cap of dense black hair that flipped as she nodded her head twice, with vigor. Half the charity committees in New York, not to mention the staff of the P.R. agency she operated, knew that look and those nods. It meant that an object stood between Naomi Selig and something she wanted, which object could expect shortly to be reduced to glowing radioactive ash.

Selig had not missed the significant “we” in his wife’s last statement. He didn’t mind in the least; in fact, he was relieved. His marriage was based on a reasonable division of labor: he cut up dead bodies, and Naomi took care of nearly everything else, especially politics, at which Selig had to admit he was less than talented.

“So what do we do?” he asked, and then, in the pregnant silence, uttered the distasteful monosyllable: “Sue?”

“Goddamn right we sue. Not only are we going to get your job back, but we’re going to make those slime-meisters stand up in public and admit they lied about your performance.”

Selig sat heavily on the couch and finished off his drink in a gulp. His stomach was feeling hollow, and there was a vile taste in his throat. “God, lawsuits! One of the things I thought I wouldn’t have to screw with when I became a pathologist. I guess this means your cousin Sidney?”

“Oh, Sidney!” said Naomi contemptuously. “It’s Sidney if you break your leg in the hospital driveway. No, we need a much heavier hitter for this one. I want Bloom to writhe.”

She sat for a while thinking, and Selig watched her think, very happy that he was not on the business end of those thoughts, if the frighteningly stony, calculating expression on her face was any indication of their content.

“Karp. We’ll get Karp to do it,” she said at last.

Selig’s head snapped back in surprise. “Butch Karp? God, that’s a shot from out of left field. Isn’t he still in D.C.?”

“No, he’s been back for ages. He works for Bohm Landsdorff Weller. Steve Orenstein got him the job when he came back to town.”

Selig looked at his wife in amazement. “My God, Naomi! How do you know this stuff?”

“Because I’m on Cerebral Palsy with Jack Weller, and once in a while I let him pat my fanny accidentally-on-purpose and he tells me stuff. Karp’s been there since, oh, around March of last year. Apparently he’s a hell of a tort lawyer, although Jack says he’ll never be a truly great one.”

“Why not?”

“Because he doesn’t lust after money enough. He has a killer instinct, though, especially when he thinks some little schmuck is getting a royal screwing.”

“That’s why we want him, because I’m a little schmuck getting screwed over?” Selig snapped, coloring brightly.

His wife’s jaw dropped briefly, and then she laughed and kissed him on the cheek. “Of course not, you kugelhead! No, we want Karp because he’s got a reason to get Sandy Bloom. It’ll be a blood match.”

Selig knotted his brow; this was getting hard to follow, and it seemed to him that his wife had entirely too much information at hand, as if she had been preparing dossiers to be consulted in the event of a whole range of potential catastrophes. “Karp has a thing against Bloom?”

“Of course he does! The whole town knows it. It’s a famous feud. There was an article in the Times magazine a couple of years ago. It was supposed to feature Sandy, but she wrote almost entirely about Karp. Sandy went ballistic. That reporter did it-big gal with a funny name …”

“What’s it about? The feud, I mean.”

“Who knows?” she replied with a shrug. “With Sandy, you hardly need a reason. In any case, you’ll call Karp.”

It was not a question. Selig nodded. She really was better at this stuff than he was. He rose and picked up the remote control from where it had landed and examined it closely. Besides cutting up bodies, he was in charge of fixing things around the house; this seemed to him a sufficient load. The gizmo appeared undamaged. He pressed the power button and the television flashed on. For some unexplainable reason, this tiny success made him feel better than he had all day. Still, something nagged him.

“Okay, say Karp’ll do it-he’s a homicide prosecutor. What if he doesn’t know anything about defamation or employment law? That stuff.”

“So he’ll learn,” said Naomi Selig blithely. “How hard could it be? He’s a sharp cookie, according to that article. God, what was that woman’s name? Maybe we should contact her. As I recall it, she didn’t like Bloom much either.”