Robert Tanenbaum - Falsely Accused

“Oh, just curiosity,” said Marlene disingenuously. “Do you happen to have the good professor’s number?”

Clunk of phone and rustle of paper while she fished it out. After Marlene wrote it down she asked, “And what’s with you, Stupe? Anything happening in the great world?”

“I cut off all my hair,” said Stupenagel, to Marlene’s surprise. She was not surprised that she had done it, just that she thought it worthy of mention.

“Did you?”

“Yes. And dyed it black. Very punky.”

“Getting interested in fashion, are we, in our old age?”

“One must keep up,” said Stupenagel airily. “For some of us, the ability to make tempting popovers does not suffice. Speaking of fashion, though, did you ever get back with Suzy Poole?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And?”

“Bye, Stupe.”

Marlene pushed the button down in the middle of Stupenagel’s outraged squawk, and immediately dialed Professor Malkin’s number. She got a secretary and made an appointment for a week hence. Then she dressed carefully, with as much fashion as she could manage, and called a cab.

The model, Suzy Poole, lived in a high-rise apartment building on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-first Street. The security was about what you would expect in a government installation holding mid-level nuclear secrets. Marlene was examined, checked over the intercom, and elevatored to the fifteenth floor by a manned car, whose operator waited to see her admitted to the Poole apartment.

Which was largely white and black, with splashes of meaningless abstract color and neon sculptures on plain stands, an obvious package by a decorator at the forward edge of au courant. Poole herself was garbed in black-tights and a sort of loose Chinese jacket in heavy cotton, an outfit that, in combination with her essential physique, made her look like a recent releasee from a Japanese prison camp. Her face, despite the famous razor cheekbones and a nose that appeared to have more than a normal complement of tiny, angled bones, seemed, without the intervening miracle of photography, curiously malformed, like that of an embryo bird.

Marlene was seated in a complicated chrome and leather sling, offered a drink, stared at with frank horror, and subjected to a long story of persecution. She took notes. The gentleman was named Jonathan Seely. He was an account executive at a big ad agency that had hired Ms. Poole to associate her cheekbones with an upmarket new perfume. A romance had blossomed, then faded, when Ms. Poole had discovered the gentleman was, as she put it, a sadistic son of a bitch. He had hit her. In the face. Now he wouldn’t stop calling. Somehow he was able to obtain her private, private number, however often she changed it. Every time the phone rang she jumped. It was interfering with her work. She was a prisoner in her own home. And so on.

Marlene closed her notebook. The model stopped talking and looked at her expectantly. Marlene said, “Well, I think I have enough to go on. Let me do some nosing around and get back to you. Tomorrow?”

Suzy Poole let a crease of doubt mar her perfection. “Umm, sure, but what do you think now? Will you be able to help?”

“Oh, yeah, I think so.”

“Like what? Not guards.”

“Oh, no. You don’t need me for guards, and the point is not to make a more secure prison for yourself, but to make him stop bothering you. For example, I noticed you haven’t filed for a protective order. That’d be one of our first steps.”

Poole made a moue of distaste, charming. “Ooh, do we have to, like, involve the courts? I mean, can’t we handle it in a more discreet way?”

“You’re concerned about this guy messing with your career if you name him publicly in a legal action?”

“I guess.”

Marlene fixed the woman’s enormous dark blue eyes with her solo jet one, and said, “Let’s get one thing straight before we go any further, Ms. Poole. This man has declared war on you. He is torturing you. He is beyond decency. Pleas haven’t helped. In order to make him stop, we must therefore make his life as unpleasant-no, more unpleasant-than he has made yours. Now, I think I can do that, and going to court is-”

The phone rang. Suzy Poole uttered a little startled noise and touched her hand to her heart.

“I’ll get it,” said Marlene, and picked up the nearest phone before Poole could say a word.

“Bitch!” said a hissing voice in Marlene’s ear.

“Mr. Seely?” said Marlene pleasantly. “This is Ms. Poole’s protective service. We ask you please not to call this number again.”

Silence, and then the click of a disconnection.

“He’ll call again,” said Marlene. “If you’re going to go ahead with this, I’ll have my partner make an appointment to rig up a recording device on your line. It’s critical that we get a physical record of him annoying you. So, are we hired?”

Suzy Poole nodded. “Yes. You’re hired. Do you, ah, want me to give you a check?”

“Not right now,” said Marlene. “I want to get my license first.”

When Marlene left Suzy Poole’s she cabbed downtown (marking the cab ride as a legitimate expense in a little book she had purchased for this purpose) and filed a P.I. application at the New York State Building on Foley Square. It was a formality. The state of New York does not want lowlife types carrying guns and poking into the private affairs of its citizens, and so keeps its private-investigator licensing laws strict. The stringency is, however, greatly reduced for former members of the NYPD, and a cynic might see a connection between the verve with which the police resist any relaxation of the City’s laws against legal gun ownership (in a town where any fifteen-year-old can pick up a piece for pocket change) and the ease with which retired cops float into the armed security business. Harry would have no trouble getting a P.I. license, and, of course, neither would the respectable lawyer and former prosecutor Marlene Ciampi.

After that, she walked a few blocks south and met Harry Bello at a cop bar near One Police Plaza, where he had just finished the act of handing in his gold potsy. There would be no big retirement racket for Harry. He had used up his friends on the Job. Harry had shot a kid, a kid who might or might not have killed his partner, killed him in cold blood and then dropped a cheap pistol on the corpse, and the cops knew it and covered for him, to protect the department, but people didn’t want to know him after that.

The place was busy, yet Harry had two empty stools on either side of him at the bar. He was drinking club soda and shuffling through a set of retirement papers.

“How’s the pension?” she asked as she sat down.

“I got Lucy as my beneficiary,” he said. “Is that okay?”

“It’s fine, Harry. I just this minute came from our first customer.”

Raised eyebrow.

“I think we can help her. The guy is a taxpayer; he won’t stand up to a serious nudge.”

Harry said, “No way. Not again.”

“I wasn’t thinking about anything as elaborate as the Pruitt thing, Harry. This guy is a different type. There’s a woman I need to see at NYU; apparently she’s got a line on who stalks and why. I think this model’s bum is going to be easy money. Oh, by the way, I got these.”

Marlene reached into her bag and brought out a small brick-shaped box. She opened it and handed Bello one of the business cards it contained, printed with:

Bello amp; Ciampi

Investigations Security

with the Crosby Street address and an unfamiliar phone number.

“The number’s an answering service,” Marlene explained. “We’ll work out of my place until we’re rich enough to spring for an office. What do you think? Bello and Ciampi, pretty classy, huh?”