Robert Tanenbaum - Falsely Accused

“Not now, a little later. I’m meeting Harry.”

Karp nodded. No news here.

“I have to get dressed,” she said, and hurried away to the bedroom.

No ninja look tonight. A sweet vulnerability, somewhat antique and out of fashion. Marlene had several elderly great aunts who, on each Christmas and birthday, supplied her with the sort of clothes a nice Catholic girl might be expected to wear on Queens Boulevard should 1955 ever make an appearance again. Marlene was thus able to dress herself in a white frilly blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a heavy tan wool skirt designed to conceal the lines of the body, and a white angora sweater that closed with a little gold chain. Her hair, which usually framed her face in a shaggy mane of natural curls, cut to shadow her bad eye, she now pulled back into the old schoolgirl center parting, held in place by industrial-strength plastic barrettes on either side. A dab of pale pink lipstick and a pair of round spectacles completed the image. Marlene thought she looked a lot like her cousin Angela, who was a bookkeeper for the archdiocese.

“I’m going now,” she said, presenting herself at the door to the living room. Karp looked away from the set and cast an appraising glance at his wife.

“Could you do ‘A Bushel and a Peck’ before you go?”

“What?”

“What. Okay, let’s see,” Karp remarked, “nearly every other night this past couple of weeks you slip out of here looking like Richard Widmark going up against the Nazis, and now you look like Rosemary Clooney. Is there something going on I should know about?”

“Not really,” she said.

The bar was so small and crummy it hardly had a name, just a dingy white sign supplied by a mixer company and a fizzing neon that said B R. Inside, a bar ran nearly the length of the room, which was about the size and shape of a railway car. Most of the lighting, dim and reddish, came from a collection of beer company signs hung on the wall. Sitting at the bar when Marlene walked in were three Latina whores, a short, dark man in a suit of aqua crushed velvet (their business manager), a pair of deteriorated alcoholics in grimy rags, and, at the extreme end of the bar, almost invisible in the shadows, Harry Bello in his usual gray suit. The barkeep, a chubby Puerto Rican with a shaved head and a wad of hair like a toilet brush under his nose, looked up as she entered. So did the whores and the pimp. The drunks looked at their drinks, as did Bello.

Marlene took off her raincoat, further astonishing her audience. It was not a venue that went in much for frilly blouses and white angora sweaters. She walked to one of the two round plywood tables and took a seat across from Rob Pruitt. He was drinking straight, cheap bourbon behind beer, and he stank of it across the table. He looked up woozily when Marlene sat down, and focused his eyes with some effort. Marlene noted that his clothes were soiled and his eyes were red-rimmed. Nor had he shaved in a couple of days; Marlene wished she had him in court this very minute.

“What the fuck do you want?” said Pruitt.

“You don’t look so hot, Rob,” Marlene replied. “I think you were a lot better off up in Alaska. I think it might be time for you to leave.”

“You’re following me around,” he said. “You’re … and that cop, following me. I saw you.”

“You think I’m following you, Rob? We live in the same neighborhood. We’re neighbors. Our paths cross.”

He stared at her, his jaw working.

“And why that accusing tone, Rob?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you like being followed? Didn’t you think Carrie liked it?”

“I love her,” he said, his voice robotic and dull.

“But she doesn’t love you.”

“She loves me,” in the same tone.

Marlene glanced at one of the beer clocks. “No, she thinks you’re a schmuck and a pest. She hates you.”

He looked at her, his eyes narrowing. “Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to break us up?”

“I don’t know, Robbie,” she replied lightly, “maybe because I’m obsessed with you. Maybe I want you for my very own.” She paused and then said, very carefully, “Forget her! Come to me, my darling! Only I love you as you deserve.”

It took several seconds for it to register. Marlene thought he hadn’t gotten the point and was about to say something further, as a result of which her guard was down when Pruitt snarled and lunged at her across the table.

He grabbed the front of her sweater with his left hand and swung a roundhouse right that landed on the side of her jaw, not a solid blow because of the clumsy angle, but hard enough to make her see red. The table went over, as did her chair. Pruitt was yelling something. He was on top of her on the beer-stinking floor, his left hand on her throat now, and his right crashing down on her mouth, this time a solid hit. She tasted blood. She tried to claw his eyes, but he knocked her hands away and struck her again as she turned her head, landing a good one on her ear. Sound vanished into ringing. His knee pressed into her chest; her breath failed and she saw his rage-distorted face begin to gray out.

Then she heard, through the ringing, a sharp crack, a sound like a bat hitting a ball or a book falling off a table. Instantly, his weight was gone. She coughed and gasped and rolled onto her side, trying to get the air flowing again and her vision working. Blood was flowing down her chin in a steady stream. She caught a pool of it in her cupped palm and wiped it off on her white sweater, and then she pressed the satin hem of the sweater tightly against her mouth

As the ringing faded she became aware of a grunting, shuffling noise, punctuated with meaty thuds. She struggled to a sitting position and looked around the barroom. A tableau: the patrons and the bartender frozen in place, their expressions ranging from avid to dull; at stage center Harry Bello calmly breaking Rob Pruitt to pieces with a short length of lead-loaded one-inch pipe wrapped in neoprene. Pruitt was on his knees, held up by Harry’s hand on his collar. Marlene saw at once that Pruitt’s jaw was out of line and his right wrist hung at a bad angle. As she watched, Harry’s pipe swung out in a short, precise arc and cracked his client’s collarbone. She watched him for a moment, both horrified and awed. Harry wasn’t even breathing hard. He was beating a man to death with the same effortless skill that Fred Astaire used when he began the Beguine.

“Enough, Harry,” she croaked. She rose to her feet, trailing drops of blood and put a restraining hand on his arm. “Enough,” she said again, louder.

He looked at her and said, “Are you okay?”

She said, “Yeah, it’s just a cut lip. It looks worse than it feels. You better make the calls.”

Harry nodded and let go of Pruitt’s collar. The man collapsed at her feet like a sack of golf balls. Harry cuffed him to the bar rail and went off to phone. Marlene sat down. One of the whores gave her a damp cloth. Marlene smiled thanks at her and dabbed at the dried blood. She checked the beer clock and looked at the door expectantly. Right on schedule, in walked Carrie Lanin.

After the cops and the ambulance and the emergency room and swearing out the multiple complaints against Pruitt, it was two-thirty before Marlene walked into the loft. They’d cleaned up her face and put a few stitches into her mouth, but she was turning interesting colors. Her lip looked like a raw Italian sausage, her outfit like a butcher’s apron.

Unfortunately, Karp had dozed off in front of the TV, and was awakened by her return.

“ Jesus Christ, Marlene… !”

“I don’t want to hear about it, not tonight,” she said, moving past him toward the bedroom. He followed close behind.