Robert Tanenbaum - Justice Denied

“Butch? Are you okay? God, you look like death warmed over! Whatever got into you? You know you can’t drink.”

“Can too,” said Karp.

“Nonsense! Jewish husbands don’t drink or beat up their wives. I learned that at my mother’s knee. If I wanted a lush I would’ve married somebody I could at least take to church. What’s wrong with you, then?”

“Nothing,” said Karp. “I’m just tired.”

“Oh, horseshit! It’s that goddamn knee again, isn’t it? You said you were going to take care of it.”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Karp. “Meanwhile, could you get me some ice?”

She dumped her papers on the floor and snapped her glasses off. Going to the refrigerator, she said, “I ought to make you crawl for it. Honestly, you’re a complete infant.”

She wrapped a dozen ice cubes in a baggie and a dish towel and brought the ice pack over to Karp, who had slipped out of his trousers in the meantime and unwrapped the Ace bandages that had held the errant joint together all day. His knee looked red, hard, and unnatural, like a pomegranate.

“Jesus!” she exclaimed. “You can walk on that? It looks like something in the window of a Chinese grocery that the Chinese don’t even know what it is.” She giggled, “God, you look nutty in your shirt and tie and no pants.”

“Thank you for your support in my hour of need,” Karp said stiffly.

“Oh, stop it! This is completely your fault, and I’m not going to feel all guilty and rush around being Florence Nightingale. I have an actual infant to take care of. Dammit, see a doctor! Get it fixed!”

“Okay, I’ll do it,” said Karp grumpily.

“Honest, swear to God?”

“Yeah, I’ll see Hudson tomorrow. I’ll tell him it’s an emergency.”

She looked at him closely to see if he was trying to fob her off with a facile evasion, and then, deciding that he was sincere, plopped down beside him on the sofa and put her arm around his neck.

He said, “That’s better. Speaking of the actual infant, how is she?”

“She’s perfect. She’s an angel. But the child-care situation is deteriorating badly. Belinda has informed us that she is returning to her beautiful island home in two weeks.”

“Why? I thought she liked it here.”

“It’s a family thing, which she told me in great detail and which I won’t repeat. But that makes two exploited third-world women we’ve hired in the past three months to keep me liberated, and I’m sick of it. And don’t give me that look! I’m not stopping work, even if I have to take Lucy into court with me, or better yet, drop her off in your office. You’re a bureau chief. You can sit on your butt all day and give orders.”

“Wait a second, I thought you were a bureau chief too.”

“Yes, but my bureau, concerned as it is with trivialities like rape and child abuse, has only five attorneys in it, of whom I am one. I spend six times as much time running my ass off as you do.”

“There’s a child-care center-”

“No! I am not going to have our daughter stuck in a disease-ridden barn and shoved in front of a TV all day. Or worse.”

“No, listen!” he said. “I heard Tina Linski talking to somebody today in the bureau office, a cop-no, she was a parole officer. Her sister had her kid in this group home and they were looking for another baby and she wanted to know if Tina wanted to move her kid in there. I just caught snatches of the conversation, but it sounded real nice. The woman’s got degrees up the ying-yang in early education and child psych-”

“Who, the parole officer?”

“No, the woman who takes care of the kids. And the place is in Tribeca. You could drop her off on the way to work.”

“What was her name, the parole officer?”

“I didn’t catch it. A kind of chubby woman, short, dark hair. You could ask Tina.”

“I’m on the case. But it sounds too good to be true. On the other hand, we should be due for some good luck. I got a letter from Lepkowitz today.”

“What does he want, more rent?”

“No. It seems that nice old Mr. Lepkowitz in Miami Shores, driven to a final paroxysm of greed by Lepkowitz Junior, has decided to take this building co-op.”

“Oh, shit!”

“Indeed. I talked to Larry and Stuart downstairs about it briefly before you got home. Stuart’s been dickering with Lepkowitz Junior. Morton. He’s talking as high as two hundred thou a floor, plus the maintenance is going to run at least four bills a month.”

Karp felt his stomach turn over. “Christ, Marlene! That’s almost twice what we’re paying in rent. And how’re we going to come up with two hundred large? Take bribes?”

“It may come to that,” she said. “No, Stu and Larry have been running numbers like crazy. They tell me that if we put most of the forty-five grand we have in CDs into a down payment, and if we both keep working, we’d qualify for a thirty-year note. The monthly nut, principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and maintenance, will run about twenty-two hundred.”

He gasped. “For this?” he blurted out quite spontaneously. Marlene scowled. It was a sore point between them. She had converted an old electroplating factory loft into a living space, years before the notion of SoHo had been concocted by real estate agents, or the loft area south of Houston Street had gone chichi. When Marlene moved in and did the grueling work of cleaning, painting, wiring, plumbing, and carpentry by herself, or with the help of her family, nobody but a few artists had lived in the area. It had been illegal to live in such buildings. In those days, she would sit on her fire escape and look out at square miles of blackness lit only by the windows of a dozen or so pioneers.

Now, in the late seventies, companies would convert a loft to the specifications of artistic millionaires. Loft buildings in this part of Manhattan had become gold mines for their owners. And Marlene’s loft was a nice one. It was a single floor-through room over thirty feet wide and a hundred long, with windows on both ends and a big skylight in the middle. At one end, under the huge windows looking out on Crosby Street, was a sleeping platform. There was an enclosed nursery, and the rest of the space was divided by partitions, like a series of stage sets, into a bathroom (which held a rubber thousand-gallon tank that Marlene had rescued from the electroplaters and converted into a hot tub), a fully equipped kitchen, a living area, a dining room under the skylight, a sort of gym-cum-storeroom, and, at the end under the Grand Street windows, an office lushly crowded with house plants.

On the other hand, Karp thought it was no place to bring up a child. A child had to have, as in his Brooklyn boyhood, a street shaded by sycamore trees, and backyards, and other kids on the street to play potsy and ringelevio with, and there should be a mom who came out at around six, dressed in an apron, to call the kid in off the street. Karp valued his peace too much to actually express this fantasy to Marlene, but it was there in his mind, a constant irritant, now spurred to a fever by the prospect of having to actually buy this place.

Marlene, naturally, knew precisely what was going on in his mind and would have delivered a devastating riposte had she not been aware that Karp was in considerable physical torment. Instead, therefore, she said, lightly, “Well, we don’t have to worry about it this minute. Lots of things could happen. Lepkowitz père could go out any minute-he’s in his eighties-and with any luck the property could be in probate until Lucy’s ready for Smith, and with a little more luck, Lepkowitz fils could go under a bus, and our problems would be over.”

“Yeah, and the horse could learn to sing,” said Karp glumly. He lifted the ice pack and inspected his knee. It was down some but not nearly normal; in this it was a model of his life.