Irresistible Impulse (20 page)

“Okay, right. She’ll probably call me from the precinct, and I want to be paged when she does. Where’s Tranh?”

“In the back. Cooking something.”

Cooking? “Put him on,” she ordered, and when Tranh came on, she asked, “What happened, Vinh?”

“The man arrived at the office building,” said Tranh in French, speaking staccato, a military report. “He came out of the office holding Madame Lanin. He took her into a car. I supposed he had a weapon under his coat, so I could do nothing. Then I followed them—”

“How? How did you follow them?”

“In a cab,” said Tranh. “It was”—he seemed to search for a word—“
cinématique
, you know? Follow that car! So, they parked. I approached cautiously. There were shots. I ran and found them. He was dead. I went to a phone and called the police, without giving my name. This was correct, yes?”

“Yes. Then what?”

“The police, many cars. They took her in charge. I returned here. I am preparing noodles with scallions and cod, and hot peppers.”

“How was she?”

“Frightened, of course, but well. And free now, naturally. Of him, I mean. I suppose it is a satisfactory denouement.”

Marlene was about to press Tranh for more details, but decided she did not want to know any more details. No, definitely not.

She hung up and looked around the small, pretty space, feeling mildly disoriented. The bronze statue of Beethoven looked down at her, offering no inspiration. The crowd had thinned. She followed the last of the concertgoers through the doors of the little hall.

The stage was brightly lit, furnished with four straight chairs and a black Steinway for the first piece, the Mozart quintet. As she watched, a man in a dinner suit came out and made a pitch for the New York Chamber Music Society, and boosted the present concert, and then the lights dimmed and the quintet of musicians walked on, the string players holding their instruments. As they took their seats in the hushed hall, Marlene walked down the side aisle and through the door that led to backstage. Wolfe was standing at the entrance to the corridor that led from the stage to the dressing room.

“Anything up?” she asked him.

“No one who looks wrong so far,” he said. “Not that we’d know.”

“No. Okay, I’m going to hang out at the stairway end of this hall. I spotted that guy we saw in her building, the sister’s boyfriend, the blond. You get anything on him yet?”

“Sorry, no. Working on it. He still wearing the leather jacket?”

“No, a suit and tie. Okay, we’ll watch for him. Anyway, anyone who wants to get to the dressing room has to pass one of us.” Wolfe nodded. He had his eyes fixed on the musicians, who were making tuning noises. Marlene went down the hall, and as she approached the dressing room door, she saw the stairwell door slowly swinging closed. Through the safety glass window she saw the shadow of a man.

She stopped, backtracked, and threw open the dressing room door. One look sufficed. She shouted over the Mozart, “Wolfe, he’s here!” and took off toward the stairwell. There were sounds above her on the stairs, but they also seemed to come from below. She yelled, “Wolfe, check downstairs! I’m going up.”

So she did and found herself on a floor of the music school, lined with practice rooms. The wide corridor stretched before her, quite empty. She ran to one of the glass-windowed soundproof doors. Empty. To another. A girl was sitting alone playing a French horn. All the rest of the practice rooms were empty, except for one in which a slender black youth was pounding away on a grand piano. Marlene had her hand on the door and was about to push through when she stopped herself. What would she say to him? She hadn’t seen the intruder; thus, no identification was possible. It could have been the pianist or the horn player, but it could have as easily been someone else, who had slipped down some other corridor. The building was one of the most complex in Lincoln Center, containing not only Alice Tully but two theaters, dozens of studios, practice rooms, and offices, and a warren of hallways connecting these in odd ways, not to mention the unusually large number of exits such a facility naturally required. She thought again of the boyfriend, the blondie. He had seen her in the lobby; he had known she was out of position. He could have just lost himself in the crowd, gone out, entered again through the school proper, and approached the dressing room from the stairway side.

She sighed and walked back to the Tully. She wasn’t a cop; she couldn’t walk up to people and demand that they identify themselves; she couldn’t call for squads of boys in blue to scour a building. She felt like a fool, and she was going to have to appear a fool before Edie Wooten and her family and colleagues. Sheepdog indeed!

“What did he do?” asked Karp later when she was telling the tale, lying in the crook of his arm on the red couch, with the television muted and a commercial making colored patterns designed to hypnotize and confuse.

“Oh, he neatly snipped the heads off all the flowers in the room, and left his own bouquet, with a note. Same fancy paper. Roses. They always leave roses, you know that? Nuts, I mean. I would expect mums, lilies, sometimes, but no, it’s always roses. It’s probably genetic.”

“What did the note say?”

“It said, ‘Darling, you’re not listening. I may have to get angry with you.’ ”

“Sounds like my kind of guy,” said Karp. “Ow!”

“It’s not funny,” said Marlene. “This guy is smart, and I’m starting to think that he could be dangerous.”

“You like the sister’s squeeze for it?”

“He was there, and not only there, I saw him again, after, and he gave me a look.”

“A look?”

“Yeah, a look, a grin. He knew who I was. But what was I supposed to do, pat him down? See if he had scissors? Roses on his breath? Edie was wiped out when she came back at the intermission. It was incredible that she was able to finish the concert. I am not in good cess with her family and friends.”

“That was quite a pinch, dear,” said Karp, rubbing the inside of his thigh. “I think I’m bleeding.”

“You
should
bleed, a crack like that! Oh, stop pouting! You look just like Zak. Here, I’ll rub it and make it better.”

“Maybe kissing would make it get better faster.”

She gave him an appraising look. “I thought you had a big day tomorrow.”

“I do, but the night is long,” said Karp. He pulled her closer and began to knead the back of her neck.

“Wait,” she said, attracted by a change in the light from the TV. “I want to watch the news first. Goose the sound.”

The screen filled with the image of a dark car, and the driver’s door open, the driver’s window shattered and covered with blood. Yellow crime-scene tape marked off the scene, and there was the usual crowd of cop cars and cops wandering about.

“What’s this?” Karp asked.

“Sssh!” said Marlene as the camera focused on a well-groomed black man in a tan parka, holding a mike. He spoke for the required twenty seconds, explaining that after a daring daylight kidnapping in the garment district that had left one person dead and one gravely wounded, the victim, Carrie Lanin, had wrested his weapon away from Robert Pruitt, her abductor, and turned it on him, shooting him dead. The anchorman thanked the reporter. The scene shifted to the interior of an office, the camera dwelling lovingly on bloodstains on the wall and floor. A weeping Hispanic woman gave eight seconds about how quickly it had happened, how horrible. Then a still photograph of R. Pruitt from some official file, looking blank and ordinary—message: even guys who look like this can go nuts. Then, finally, a quick shot of Carrie Lanin, frail-seeming with that disaster-survivor stare on her face, being escorted into a building by a uniformed cop and a female detective.

Marlene zapped off the sound. Karp cleared his throat. He felt chilled.

“Well,” he said, “you’re not having much of a day.”

“No,” she said. “I sent Harry to straighten things out. Everybody was real nice to her, he said. I should have gone to see her, but I honestly didn’t have the energy. I’ll go see her tomorrow.” Her tone was dull, as if she were talking to herself.

“Straight self-defense,” Karp mused in a similar tone. “She got the gun away from him and shot him. That’s not the way it usually goes down.”

“No,” she said. All the warmth seemed to be leaking from the room. His arm felt like a dead log across her shoulders.

“She must be a lot tougher than she looks,” he said.

“Apparently.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess … I mean, it’s probably not a good idea for me to be personally involved in this one. Because of your connection with her. I’ll tell Roland to, ah, report directly to Jack on it. Not that I think there’ll be much to report. If it went down the way it looks.” A long pause. “Did it?”

“As far as I know,” she said tightly. Neither of them cared to look at the other. Marlene stood up abruptly. “I’m going to bed,” she said without invitation.

One of the advantages of the new live-in child-care arrangements
chez
Karp was that Karp could occasionally indulge his cowardice by slipping out of the house early. Normally the most uxorious and paternal of men, there were times when he did not want to engage in familial relationships, and this was one of them. For it was, in fact, a big day for Karp: in the morning Judge Marvin Peoples would entertain oral argument in re: the motions in
Rohbling
to suppress the confession and to suppress the critical evidence in Jonathan Rohbling’s little blue suitcase, and after that he would rule. In all likelihood, of course, Peoples had already made his decision, or ninety-one percent of it, but in a major case like this one, he would want both attorneys to stand up in front of him and whale away so that the issues would be apparent to the public. Or maybe he really did want explication of the arguments. God knew, they were tortuous enough. Karp had them packed into his head like a model made of bent Popsicle sticks. He felt as if his head was under tension from the inside, as if any emotional or mental shock would collapse the whole structure and leave him blithering before the bench.

Like, for example, the thought that his wife might have been involved in killing Rob Pruitt. He shook his head vigorously to bar the thought as he walked with characteristic long, stiff strides down Centre Street toward the courthouse. For this reason he had skulked from his home. He had not wanted to see Marlene, or to take the chance of seeing a lie written on her face.

Terrell Collins was there waiting in the bureau office, as tightly wound as his boss, dressed in his soberest suit and a faint cloud of Aramis. Karp smiled, invited him into his private office, and laid out the coffee and toasted bagels he had purchased for the two of them in the ground-floor snack bar.

They ate and drank, making desultory talk, listening to the outer office begin work. At five to nine, they walked to Part 46.

Ordinarily, motions are heard in nearly vacant courtrooms; oral argument is not a major spectator sport. With a case like
Rohbling
afoot, however, it was a different matter. The press was out in numbers, and Karp and Collins had to fight their way from the elevator to the door of the courtroom through a couple of TV crews and a crowd of journalists waving microphones and mini-recorders.

The courtroom itself was packed with people: the print press in rows, the families of the victims, their supporters from the black community, and the usual miscellany of legal geeks who showed up at every important trial.

Karp and Collins sat. Waley came in, looking like he had just spent a week at Gstaad; he nodded, they nodded back. In came Rohbling with his guard; a murmur from the gallery, suppressed hisses. Karp noted that his glasses were still smudged, and that he retained the air of bemused helplessness he had borne at the arraignment. In came Judge Peoples; all rose, all sat.

Marvin Peoples had a head like a cannonball, one covered in smooth morocco leather. He had a wife and three children, and it is possible that he smiled in their presence, but no one had ever seen him crack a grin on the bench. His voice was a bass rumble.

“We will begin with the motion to invalidate the confession in this case. Mr. Waley?”

Waley rose and, in his remarkable voice, began his brilliant exegesis of the law as it related to the legality of confessions. Karp slouched in his seat and took notes. You could always learn something, he thought.

After the hearing, Karp went right up to see the district attorney.

“There’s good news and bad news,” he said.

“So I gather,” said Keegan.

“You heard already?”

“I have sources, Butch. What happened?” Keegan was wearing his stone face.

Karp looked him in the eye. “You read the motions and the responses—what can I say? He bought Waley’s argument out of
Moran
v.
Burbine
. Confession not voluntary, knowing, and intelligent. Especially the knowing part. The mutt was under treatment and on a course of antipsychotics, had stopped taking them, hence nuts, hence not ‘knowing.’ He went with
Smith
v.
Zant
too. I think the clincher was that Rohbling asked for the pills and the cops denied him. The foul breath of
Connelly
compulsion there, I think. I was nervous about that myself.”

“And asking for the lawyer, that horseshit about the shrink?”

“Yeah, and that. Judge made a little law there—the operative fact is the understanding on the part of the police that the suspect is requesting counsel. That the person requested is not in fact counsel does not bear on the requirement to cease the interview. Then he bounced our point from
Mosely
—the resumption of questioning after the request for counsel was not about a crime different in time, place, and nature. ‘Ingenious, but not compelling, Mr. Karp,’ says His Honor. The critical word there is ‘
and
,’ according to Judge Peoples. The guy has a legal mind on him, I’ll give him that. Anyway, we lost the confessions.”

“But you still have Hughes,” said Keegan.

“Yeah, we still do. And we got the suitcase. The judge went down the line with the
McBain
argument. Suspect renounced the bag in front of the police and witnesses, therefore it was fair game.”