Robert Tanenbaum: Corruption of Blood

Still laughing, Marlene went to the refrigerator and pulled out a large olive jar. She dumped the olives onto the dish and held the jar out to Harry. He put the hand in it, and Marlene covered the thing with Smirnoff.

"Anyone want an olive?" she asked brightly.

They packed their scant possessions and spent the night in a Holiday Inn in Rosslyn. Sweetie stayed in the car.

"We're going to lose our security deposit," said Karp as they settled in to bed. "And the bill for this and the airfare is going to wipe out our credit. Too bad about Lucy's bone marrow transplant."

"No problem," said Marlene, "I have my special rosary with the plastic beads full of water from Lourdes."

"Oh, right," said Karp, "how could I forget? Seriously, though, what are we actually the fuck going to do?"

"I don't know, go back to the city. Get jobs. Live in our rapidly appreciating loft."

"Oh, God! Interviews!" Karp moaned. "Dewey, Rip-off, and Howe. Are we going to be able to stand it?"

"I always liked Cheating, Poore, Widdowes, and Leffing," said Marlene.

"Hell, you don't have to worry, your good buddy Bloom will take you back."

Oh, shit, thought Marlene. It was like the moment when you're lying on your back after an overindulgence and you know that whatever you do you are going to end up on your knees with your head over the toilet. Marlene sighed and said, "Um, not really." And it all came out.

Karp considered this for a long moment and then said, "You popped him good, huh?"

"Yeah. I think he lost a couple of caps."

"Well, that solves one problem anyway."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean he's gone. I'll take him out. I'll find a way. He'll go. I might let him keep his law license, I don't know. But it'll mean we can both go back to work for the DA."

"You're not pissed?"

"No," said Karp in surprise. "Why should I be pissed? You didn't try to rape him, he tried to rape you."

Marlene felt the most wonderful relaxation seeping into her body; she felt little demons flying in panic out of her fingertips. She started to giggle. "Oh, dear, we can go back to working our asses off among the scum of the earth. What joy! I've never been so happy."

She stretched languorously and rolled over. "But you know what I'd really like to do, though. I'd like us to live in a classy midtown hotel, with lots of art deco furniture, and solve high-tone crimes that don't involve severed body parts. Nick and Nora Charles never had to cope with body parts that I can recall."

"Dear, Nick and Nora were childless, wealthy alcoholics, none of which we are. And they were fictional."

"But they had a dog," said Marlene sleepily. "We have a dog. It's a start."

"It's not a start. If you recall, Asta was a cute little thing that Nora could scoop up at a run when she jumped into a cab to chase the bad guy down Fifth Avenue. Your dog is the size of a taxicab. It's not the same thing. Marlene?"

"Sleep," said Marlene.

The next day, before they checked out, Karp dressed carefully in a blue suit and went down to the Annex Building to quit, asking Marlene to pick him up at Georgetown University at around noon. He took his raincoat. A front was coming through and the sky was dark and blustery, and rain was falling when he left the metro at Federal Center Southwest.

Wilkey, he learned, was up on the Hill. Karp found a vacant typewriter, hunt-and-pecked out a brief letter of resignation, and left it on Wilkey's desk. Before leaving, he added to his list of recent crimes against the United States by stealing a case box from the supply room. He transferred the material from the tattered red envelope into the case box and left without a backward look.

Karp stuck the phone message slip back in the box. He read over what he had written and tossed the stack of legal bond into the box too. The other material followed. Carrying his raincoat and the case, he went back into the library archives, row upon row of dusty boxes stacked on steel shelves. He selected a particularly disused-looking section at random and put the case into one of the boxes.

Marlene was waiting for him in her yellow car, just beyond the ornate iron gates. It had stopped raining, or rather the rain had turned into a thick drizzling mist.

"Where to, chief?" asked Marlene.

"Daddy, are we going back to New York?" Lucy asked from the backseat.

"Yeah, baby, but first I want to stop somewhere."

Karp got behind the wheel and drove across the Key Bridge to Arlington. He took the turnoff to the cemetery. "I've never been. I thought we'd pay our respects on the way home."

He parked in the lot. The mist was thicker in the low land by the river. Lucy was delighted with it and trotted up ahead until she was lost from view and then ran back giggling. "Don't get too far, Lucy!" Marlene called out.

They stood in front of Kennedy's grave, with its yellow flame, for a minute or so, in private thought. Then Karp asked, "What about Maggie Dobbs?"

"I was by there while you were in the library. We had tea. I handed over all the material and my notes, except for the film. I think she was glad to see my back, poor lady. But it's her life."

"You told her he didn't do it."

"Yeah. I mean, what the hell! Why should the dead plague the living?" She addressed the grave: "Including you."

"What did you do with it? The film."

"I have it right here." She patted her bag. "You know, the place is deserted. If Lucy wasn't running around, we could rip off a quick one right here. On the grave."

Karp laughed. "Yeah, right. Being him, he'd probably look down and laugh."

"Up and laugh. If Sister Mary Agnes at St. Joe's wasn't just jiving us about mortal sin and the sanctity of the sacrament of marriage, where he is, he'd have to be looking up."

She stepped forward and took the roll of film out of her bag. She stripped it in long loops off the spool and held an end over the eternal flame. It caught immediately, and the old celluloid stock started burning fiercely. She threw the flaming coils onto the pathway and they watched it, silently, as it turned to indecipherable ashes.