Robert Tanenbaum: Falsely Accused

“Are you okay?” asked Harry, getting up.

Marlene was on her hands and knees, retching into the tin wastebasket. She brought the spasms under control, got to her feet.

“Yeah, just great,” she said. “You?”

“My arm’s fucked up, but I’m okay. Jesus, the thing that wouldn’t die.” Marlene went into the bathroom. She rinsed out her mouth at the sink. Fortunately, the mirror had been shattered by a bullet, so that she didn’t have to look at herself. When she came out she made herself look at the corpse.

“Christ, Harry, who the hell is he?”

“Was he,” said Harry. He was going through the items on the bedside table: a.38 Chief’s Special in a woven belt holster, a wallet, a pair of sunglasses, a set of keys, and a black leather badge folder. Harry flipped open the badge folder, revealing an NYPD detective’s gold shield and ID.

“Paul Jackson,” he said. Half consciously, he slipped the shield into his pocket.

The name barely registered with Marlene. “My God! Where’s Isabella?”

They quickly searched the motel room. Nothing. Harry grabbed the keys from the nightstand and ran out to the car. He opened the trunk.

Harry tried to wave Marlene off, but she pushed forward and looked into the trunk. The marks around the girl’s throat were the same as those on the young men in the autopsy photographs.

Marlene screamed. She shouted curses, not the sexual and scatalogical obscenities of the Anglo-Saxons, but the dreadful blasphemies of Sicily, in Sicilian. God was a dog. God was a pig. The Madonna was a whore. Jesus was the son of a diseased whore. She pissed in Christ’s wounds. She cried, great heaving sobs, and smashed her hands again and again against the roof of the car. She tore at her hair. Harry grabbed her and held her still, while the sirens grew in volume.

Harry dealt with the local cops. Marlene sat in Harry’s car and shivered. Harry had given her his suit jacket to wear because she had started shivering. It was stained down the front with Jackson’s blood. She had her hands thrust deep into its side pockets. Her hands closed around something hard and angular, and she drew out the two keys with the red labels and looked at them dumbly.

Then her mind started to function again. A building at 800 some avenue and an apartment on the eighteenth floor. Yes. She had, in fact, been in that very apartment. In less than a minute she had figured the whole thing out.

“Why am I not surprised?” said Karp. It was two in the morning, Monday morning. Marlene had returned from Pennsylvania an hour earlier, had stripped and plunged into a perfumed bath, ignoring Karp’s questions, and then had emerged and related the terrible events of the day, and what she and Harry Bello had made of it all.

“No, ‘surprised’ is not the word,” said Marlene. “Maybe ‘stupefied.’ Here’s a guy who has all the money in the world, he has a powerful position, he’s good-looking, personable. He could get all the sex, of any variety, that any man could possibly want. Why does he decide to rape the fourteen-year-old daughter of his maid?”

“Why not? He tried to rape the head of the Rape Bureau, didn’t he? And got away with it? And he probably would’ve gotten away with this one too if Jackson hadn’t been such a dumbass and Bloom had remembered to get his keys back.”

Marlene sighed and lay back on the pillows. At a certain level, she thought, evil becomes incomprehensible to the rational mind and exists only as agony, a bone cancer to the spirit. Tears were still leaking from her eyes at intervals, as much as she tried to push from her mind the thought of that thin white body curled into the filthy trunk of Jackson’s car. There had been no telltale marks on Isabella’s ankles. Jackson had hung her from the shower head; her own small weight had sufficed. Murdering the cabbies at the precinct, he had been forced into a horizontal technique, because the fixtures in the rotten ceilings (oh, yes, she remembered now, but she hadn’t made the connection at the time) wouldn’t have held the weight of even a skinny Central American. Jackson had probably intended to leave her dangling somewhere on the nuns’ property, another sad Latina suicide. Clearly not one to let a good idea go, Jackson, not that any of it mattered now. She would have to tell Lucy in the morning. And Hector.

“The only things that’re missing,” Karp said, “is, one, how Jackson and Seaver were brought into it in the first place, and two, how Isabella got to the shelter.”

Marlene brought her thoughts back to the present. “How do you mean?”

“Okay, the girl gets raped. The mother, the maid, finds out. She takes off, quits, gets a new place to live. Does she go to the cops? No, she’s an illegal, she wouldn’t dare. But somehow Jackson and Seaver find her, and they figure out that Bloom is the rapist. This would be last May. Jackson had murdered Ortiz in March and Valenzuela in April. Fuentes had just died too, and there was an investigation heating up. So they go to Bloom and they say, we got the girl you raped, make sure there’s no serious investigation of the guys we killed. It was manna from heaven, finding that girl. Anyway, Bloom says something like, hey, I can’t control the determination of murder, that’s the M.E.’s job and he’s an independent bastard. So they, Seaver probably, says, get rid of him, put your own guy in there. And he does. All the dates check like clockwork. Still, there’s something missing on how the two of them got on to the rape in the first place.”

“Yeah, but how she got to the shelter is easy,” said Marlene. “Bloom obviously says to them, okay, deal, but you have to get rid of the girl. She has to disappear. So Seaver takes her to the shelter and leaves her on the doorstep. That date checks too.”

“Why Seaver?”

“Because if it was Jackson, he would’ve killed her,” said Marlene. “He did kill her, may he burn in Hell forever. No, Jackson says, we got to whack the girl. Seaver says, hey, I’ll do it, you did the two spic cabbies, it’s only fair. But Seaver’s a softy; he doesn’t like rough stuff, and also he’s being a clever boy, because it gives him an edge, Bloom ever starts saying, ‘What rape was that, Detective?’ So he drops her at the shelter instead and tells Jackson and Bloom she’s buried out in the Meadowlands someplace.”

“So how did Jackson find her after all this time?” Karp asked.

“Ah, fuck if I know,” said Marlene groggily. “We haven’t quite penetrated to the bottom of this yet. We’ll find out the whole thing when they grab Seaver, though. He’ll talk.” She clicked off the bedside light, and they lay awhile in the semidarkness, in the pale moonlike glow of the street lights filtering through the blinds on the wide bedroom windows. “What’ll this do to your case?” she asked, suddenly remembering the ostensible cause of the entire cascade of revelations.

“I don’t know,” said Karp. “When the press gets hold of what happened down there, it’s going to really hit the fan. I’ll have to think about it in the morning.”

In the morning, as Karp had expected, the shooting death of an NYPD detective in a Chester motel room, the murdered illegal-immigrant child, and the involvement of a faintly notorious one-eyed feminist private detective made an irresistible story. Even the staid Times gave it page one, although below the fold. What Karp had not expected was what the Times ran above the fold, in a two-column piece on the left side: Murder Alleged in Custody Deaths of Gypsy Cabbies, read the headline, and the byline read A. A. Stupenagel. Karp devoured the piece on the subway going downtown to his office, muttering curses and imprecations in so energetic a tone that, although the car was crowded, a cautious circle opened up around him.