Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“I’m sorry,” said Vivian Fein, after some minutes. “It’s hard to explain. I was thinking about my father.” She paused, glanced at Marlene in a way that seemed to demand some recognition, as if this father were so well-known as to require no further explanation, and then she blushed and said, “Ah, shit, you must think I’m crazy”-here she uttered a shrill laughlike sound. “Oh, yeah, why would you think that, just because I ran out of my house dressed in a blanket and a pair of panties? Of course, I assume you know all about my father, just because that’s what’s rattling around in my head all the time. Isn’t there a disease where people think they’re transparent? That everyone can see their thoughts?” A spate of silent shaking laughter, dissolving into liquid weeping.

Marlene adopted a neutral expression and waited. The father thing was interesting. Maybe it wasn’t the S.O. this time, for a change. Or maybe Dad was both-not at all unknown in the business. The Fein woman stopped being semi-hysterical and drew away, and leaned against the wall. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose on Marlene’s wad of tissues. To her surprise, Marlene now found herself subject to an appraising look, with a hint of hardness. A quick recovery. Or the waterworks was an act. Or the woman was deep in tranquilizer psychosis.

“You don’t look like what I thought you would,” she said.

“I never do,” said Marlene coolly. “Let’s cut the horseshit, Ms. Fein. I presume you wanted to see me about whoever beat you up. I’ll need his name and details of the incident, plus any information about past abuses, with documentation.”

“Documentation?” The woman was staring at her as if she were speaking in a foreign tongue.

“Yes. Visits to the emergency room or private doctors. Calls to the police. Any witnesses to the violence. . I’m sorry, you find this amusing ?”

The woman brought her giggling under control. Definitely pills, thought Marlene. “No, I’m sorry, really. I realize I must seem crazy to you. But. . no, there’s no witnesses. No documentation. And that’s not why. . whew!” Fein took several deep breaths. “We got off on the wrong foot, Ms. Ciampi. I don’t want you to pursue my husband in any way. I want to hire you for something else altogether.”

Marlene cocked her head, the attitude of disbelief, and also, in her particular case, the way in which she focused attention with her one good eye. “Excuse me. It’s a reasonable assumption. This is a battered women’s shelter you’re in.”

“Yes, and I do need protection, and I’m incredibly grateful for it, but this is something I have to do, and I can’t do it from home. My husband would not approve, and he’s an extremely watchful and suspicious man.”

“Uh-huh. And what is it you want to hire me to do?”

“I want you to investigate the death of my father, Gerald Fein. He was a lawyer. He supposedly committed suicide in 1960.”

“And you think there’s something suspicious about his death, that it wasn’t a suicide? How did he die?”

A bleak smile. “I see you’re not a New Yorker.”

“But I am , born and raised. You mean you think I should recall a suicide twenty-odd years ago, of a-” Marlene clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh, shit! You don’t mean Jumping Jerry was. . Oh, Christ, I’m sorry, that was crude of me.”

“Oh, please, we’re used to it. Well, I don’t think you ever get used to it, but you learn to live with it. You must have jumped rope to the, whatever, the rhyme, if you were a city kid.”

“I was a little old. My younger sister did, though. It must have been unbelievably bad for you.”

“Yes. We loved him very much. And we thought he loved us.”

Marlene did not know what to say to this, and she did not particularly want to learn. The story now percolated back up from deep storage from where it had lain alongside Brooklyn Dodgers team rosters and the Ozone Park rules for ring-a-levio. And jump-rope rhymes, of course. Gerald Fein had gone to his office building one day and instead of getting off at the 57th floor, where his firm had its suite, he had traveled up to the observation deck, where he had somehow gotten past the barrier and, achieving the actual parapet, had walked into space, thus becoming the last man to jump successfully from the Empire State Building. After some moments of uncomfortable silence Marlene said, “Ah, Ms. Fein, regarding this investigation-I don’t, that is, in my connection with the shelter, I don’t do investigations, except for things like locating a spouse for child-support payment. But my firm, the Osborne Group, has an investigations division. I could put you in touch with them.”

The woman was shaking her head. “No, I want you to do it.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Fein, but I don’t have the time or the resources to handle a serious investigation into something that happened twenty-three years ago. Osborne does, and I ought to tell you now that if they take the case it’s going to cost you. And, not to be harsh, but you don’t look like you have a whole lot of bucks at your disposal.”

“I can pay!” the woman cried. Moving like a frightened bird, she darted her hand under the pillow of the narrow bed and snatched out a crumpled paper bag, which rattled as she brought it to her lap, and reached in. Light flashed in her hand.

“That’s real, I presume,” said Marlene, who could not help a thick swallow at what she saw.

“Oh, yeah, it’s real. One thing about Sa-my husband, he only buys the best stones. This is a six-and-a-half carat D color VVS2 quality stone in platinum. It’s worth at least a hundred forty grand.”

There was something about the way this statement popped out of Vivian Fein’s lush little mouth that raised for Marlene the notion that perhaps the deserted hubby was not one of society’s ornaments, though filthy rich, that perhaps Ms. Fein (and what was her married name, after all?) had spent some time around the hard boys. Come to that, Marlene thought further, wasn’t old Jumping Jerry mobbed up in some way? Another reason to avoid additional involvement. She stood up again and pulled her eye away from the fabulous glitter of the ring.

“You want to put that in a safe, Ms. Fein. Some of the ladies here are fairly hard types. I’ll have someone from our investigations division give you a ring. A call, I mean.”

“Take it!” said the woman. “You have to, you have to. .” She leaped up and grabbed Marlene’s sleeve, and tried to press the diamond into the pockets of Marlene’s shirt. They shuffled around the floor for a while like a pair of folk dancers from a particularly ungraceful folk, and Marlene thought, absurdly, of her tiny grandmother trying to press packets of leftovers on recalcitrant relatives, both of them doing the same sort of dance. Vivian was again weeping, Marlene saying, “Please. . excuse me. . please,” and wondering whether she would have to get rough to make her escape, when a long, full-throated scream sounded in the hallway outside.

Vivian froze. All the pink drained from her face, and her eyes showed white all around their blue centers. From outside another yell and the sound of cursing and shrill cries. Vivian jumped back from Marlene and, with crazed stupidity, looked around for somewhere to hide in the tiny cell. In a hoarse, high-pitched whisper she said, “Oh, shit, oh God, oh shit. . it’s him, oh, shit, oh, God. .”

“Stay here,” Marlene commanded inanely, pulled her pistol from its holster, and stepped out of the room. At the end of the narrow hallway a small crowd of women and kids had formed a yelling circle around what was obviously a fight. Marlene crouched down and looked between the legs of the spectators. As she had expected, one of the combatants, the one on the bottom, getting creamed by a hefty brown woman, was Brenda Nero. Marlene replaced her pistol. Heavy treads on the stairway and here came Mattie Duran at the trot, darkness on her brow. The spectators scattered before her as she pierced the circle and grabbed a handful of each combatant, heaving them to their feet and holding them apart like a pair of squabbling puppies.