Irresistible Impulse (26 page)

They both laughed. He had a loud one, although it seemed out of use, rusty. Marlene asked, “And what about you, Father? What brings you here?”

“Here? It’s a church. I’m a priest.” Blandly.

“Right. But this is a church for priests like Father Raymond. Whom God protect, but you know what I mean. Dwindling parish, the only reason they don’t get rid of it is because of the historical importance of the building and the parish and so on. Someone like you I’d expect to find a little higher up in the Church. On the provincial’s staff. A dean at Ford-ham. Or running a mission. Or in Rome.”

He examined the glowing tip of his cigarette and said, off-handedly, “Well, I was in Rome for a time. Some time ago.”

“Really? What doing?”

His smile thinned, and when he answered his voice was flat. “You certainly are a detective, aren’t you? Since you ask, I was at the Gesu.”

Marlene raised her eyebrows. She thought, My, my, you must have been quite the boy to get busted all the way from the headquarters of the Society of Jesus back to here, and wondered what it was he had done, but forbore asking.

Yet the question hung in the air between them and made further conversation difficult. When their cigarettes were gone, they said good night. Marlene walked home thinking about why a Jesuit so clever as to have once been one of the dozen or so aides to the Black Pope himself should have ended up as a curate in Old St. Pat’s, and then ran through a similar set of questions about herself: why a Sacred Heart, Smith, and Yale graduate was trotting along Mulberry, fresh from the kind of evening she had just had, with a gun in her pocket and her garters flapping in the chilly breeze, and had as little answer.

Karp was still awake when she let herself in, propped up in the bed with a scatter of papers and files around him, making notes on a legal pad.

He grinned at her when she came in. “So how did it go? Did you always hurt the one you love?”

She groaned and flopped crossways on the bed.

“Don’t ask! And if you were any kind of loving husband, you would help me get out of these fucking boots. Christ, my poor feet!”

“Gosh, I was hoping you’d walk all over me in them and show me all the tricks you learned.”

She twisted herself around and looked at him. Yeah, she thought. What better way to get that place and that man out of her head. “All right, wiseass,” she said, “you asked for it.”

She went to her bureau, pulled out four scarves, grabbed a corner of the duvet, and yanked it off the bed, scattering legal papers. As usual, Karp was wearing only a T-shirt.

“Hey!” he protested. “What’re you … ?”

Marlene got onto the bed and seized Karp’s wrist.

“Marlene. What are you doing?” he asked. “I was just kidding, Marlene. Marlene? Marlene, come on …”

But he did not, however, resist physically as she tied all four of his limbs to the bedposts.

Then she went to his closet and got his black leather belt.

“Marlene,” he said, giggling, “you touch me with that thing and you’re history. I mean it, Marlene.”

“Silence, disgusting worm!” cried Marlene, leaping up onto the bed and strutting around on it.

“Disgusting
what
… ? Marlene, cut it out!” They were both laughing and trying to stifle themselves at the same time, in the fashion of couples in bed who share a dwelling with minor children.

She dangled the belt over his groin. “Hm. See, he’s pretending he doesn’t like it, but the body never lies, does it? Does it?”

She fell to her knees and straddled his chest and slowly inched her way up until her crotch was nearly at his face.

“Take my panties off, slave!” she hissed nastily. “With your mouth.”

Remarkably, Karp was able to stop laughing long enough to do it.

Some time later, Karp whispered into her ear. “Dear, could I say something? Could we
never
do this again?”

Marlene shifted so she could fix him with her real eye. Except for her underpants she was still fully dressed, boots and all.

“Gee, Butch, you could’ve fooled me. I thought that really turned you on. I was just thinking that we could get our money’s worth out of the ten bucks I had to shell out for the membership card in that S-M club. You could borrow it, go down there, make a regular thing of it.”

“Maybe in my next life.”

“So … what? It’s back to the biweekly three-minute special in the missionary position?”

“I guess so,” said Karp. “I now find I’m really an old-fashioned girl. Although … I could maybe crank it up to four minutes. I hear there are dietary supplements … say, could you take off that dog collar? I’m getting spiked here. Jesus, I go to bed with my wife, it’s like playing second base against Ty Cobb.”

She laughed. “Oh, it’s always
something
with you. The good thing about
real
masochists, I’ve found, is that they never complain.” She removed the spiked collar and said, “Now. I am going to take a long, hot one and then return in my shapeless virginal white nightie. That should make you happy.”

“It will,” said Karp. “Oh, before you get too comfortable, you had a message from Bello on the private line. Some kind of emergency in Brooklyn.”

She sat up with a start. “What! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was tied up,” he said with a grin. “There’s a number by the phone.”

Marlene found the slip of paper, dialed it, got an answer from a precinct house in Brooklyn, asked for Bello, and when her partner came on the line said, “Harry, it’s me. What happened? What? How? Oh, shit! Harry, okay, I’m sitting down. Please, please, tell me he didn’t use that fucking machine gun. Oh, thank you, Jesus! Where is he now? They haven’t booked him through yet? Have you talked to the homicide A.D.A.? Okay, I’ll meet you at the precinct in like half an hour. Okay. Okay. Bye.” She slammed the phone down and glared at Karp.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Oh, Lonny Dane shot and killed Donald Monto over in Bensonhurst. He came after Mary Kay Miller with a .22 rifle, and Dane took him down. I got to go over there and straighten it out. Oh,
shit
! This had to happen tonight!”

She staggered to her feet and scooped her car keys off the dresser and her leather jacket off the floor. She blew Karp a kiss and said, “Sorry about this—it shouldn’t take too long, but if I’m not home by the time you have to leave,
please
don’t forget to walk Sweety. Posie’ll handle the kids, except don’t let Lucy wear jeans to school, okay?”

“Fine,” said Karp, keeping a straight face. “You sure you haven’t forgotten anything?”

She wrinkled her brow. “I don’t think so. Why?”

Karp held up a scrap of lacy black. “Your panties, one, and two, you’re going to make a better impression down at Brooklyn Homicide if you change out of that outfit.”

After they stopped laughing, Marlene said, “I’m glad to see you’re not all bent out of shape about this, at least.”

Karp shrugged. “Hey, what can I say? As long as you guys shoot them in Brooklyn.”

THIRTEEN

T
he third week in November and they still hadn’t finished picking the jury in
Rohbling
. Judge Peoples had made it clear that he did not want to go into the holiday season without a completed panel, and neither Karp nor Waley thought it prudent to defy him in this. In truth, there was little choice, for the weeks of grinding had eaten away their initial thirty peremptory challenges until, on the last day, Karp had two left and Waley had none. Karp was not sure whether that was a victory or not. He had bitten his lip to keep from challenging some venirepersons who had ultimately been impaneled, and had used his challenges to knock off some people he thought should have been removed for cause, most of which had to do with attitudes toward psychiatry. Peoples, of course, had steered this process through his ability, which he was not loath to use, of ruling what was “cause” and what was not.

Nevertheless, they now had a jury—seven women and five men on the panel and two alternates, both male. Of the fourteen, five were black, two were Asian, four were Hispanic, and the rest non-minority white. No singletons that anyone could observe; Karp made it a rule never to have singletons on homicide juries, because having someone who felt isolated from his peers was asking for a holdout and a hung jury. Karp made an exception to the rule with respect to college educations, and there was but one on the panel who had a degree, a retired NYU professor (male) who had been the last one picked, after Waley had exhausted his challenges. Karp felt pretty good about that, although the man was just an alternate. The rest were your basic New York solid types— homemakers, small business owners, clerks, artisans, a bike-messenger manager, three housewives. Their average age was rather older than the city’s average age, retired people being the only citizens who
want
to get picked for a jury. Five of them were, in fact, retirees.

Judge Peoples swore in the jury and announced that the trial would start on the day after the Thanksgiving weekend. He said that he had decided not to sequester the jury because of the season, and filled the air with blue smoke and rockets about not paying attention to media coverage of the trial and not discussing the proceedings with anyone outside the courtroom. Then he sent everyone home for the long, somnolent weekend.

Karp went back to his office and was delighted to find no one waiting for him and only two message slips, one from Dr. Emanuel Perlsteiner and one from V.T. Newbury. The staff of the Homicide Bureau had at last got the message and were now bothering Roland Hrcany. Karp hoped they were all enjoying it. He pocketed the one from V.T. And returned Perlsteiner’s call, which led him to ring up his police driver and have himself driven to Bellevue Hospital.

There, in one of the oldest and shabbiest corridors of Bellevue’s psychiatric hospital, he found Dr. Perlsteiner, in a tiny office hardly larger than a janitor’s closet. This office resembled one of those apartments that the police have to break into after the neighbors complain of the smell. It held a metal desk, a desk chair, and a straight-backed visitor’s chair. Its residual volume, save for narrow paths necessary to reach the two chairs, was almost entirely consumed by books and papers, stacked in teetering piles that reached nearly to the ceiling. Barely visible among this wrack was the proprietor.

Karp entered and stood by the desk. The visitor’s chair was covered with files and journals.

“Dr. Perlsteiner?”

Perlsteiner smiled up at him. He was a seventy-four-year-old man who looked ninety. His head was a hairless dome covered with tight skin the color of faded burlap, adorned with large liver spots and (as almost always, and now) on the broad forehead a pair of heavy, thick tortoise-shell eyeglasses. His teeth as he smiled were startlingly false. His eyes were bright and dark, shining out from deep, ash-colored pouches on either side of a little falcon nose. This head sat precariously on a short, thin, wattled neck. The general impression was of an extremely ancient sparrow.

“Yes, how are you?” said Perlsteiner. “Sit, sit, move that trash away, please.”

Karp cleared the chair and sat. Perlsteiner cocked his head and looked at his visitor, emphasizing the sparrow effect. “So,” he said, “your name is, please?” His English was only slightly accented.

“Um, I’m Roger Karp, Dr. Perlsteiner. You called me, remember?”

Wrinkled brow, followed by delighted discovery. “Karp, yes! And how are you feeling today, Mr. Karp?”

Karp was at the moment not feeling well at all. The old guy’s lost it, he thought. I sent a senile shrink to examine Jonathan Rohbling. He thinks I’m some patient. But he said, carefully, “I’m fine, Doctor. This isn’t about me. I’m here about your examination of Jonathan Rohbling.”

Dr. Perlsteiner’s eyes narrowed. He slipped his glasses down into position, magnifying those eyes, which, Karp now saw, were far from gaga, were alert, even piercing. He said, “Yes, I know that, Mr. Karp. I asked out of courtesy, and because I detect you are ill at ease. I wondered why that is.”

Karp felt sweat start beneath his arms and on his upper lip. It was true that he had felt somewhat odd since the sexual extravaganza of the previous night. Karp was not a prude in the sense that he took any minatory interest in the sexual behavior of others (except, professionally, when it included murder as a delight), but he had a strict sense of what was proper for
him
, a meat-and-two-vegetables sensuality, that is, and the funny business with Marlene had touched areas in his psyche that he wished had not been touched at all, that he did not wish even to think about. And he was at that moment subject to an absurd fear that
it showed
, was obvious to the searching eye of this shrink, who, in truth, was the canniest whom Karp had ever encountered. It also briefly crossed his mind that the doc had picked up on the now embarrassing thought he had entertained that Perlsteiner might be ready for the soft-brain ward, which clearly he was not, far from it. So Karp sat and blushed.

Perlsteiner, for his part, knew what guilt looked like from fifty years of practice and knew also that, Karp not being a patient, the thing to do was to drop his gaze and clean his glasses, which he did, and then he unerringly yanked his notes on Rohbling out from a stack of identical-seeming files. He paged through them briefly and then spoke, looking down at the pages of spidery writing.

“Yes, Rohbling. What have we here? No gross neurological defect. No systematic delusions. No paranoid ideation. Hm, hm. Actually, you know, an interesting case.”

“Is he insane?”

Perlsteiner looked up sharply at the word, and slid his glasses back onto his forehead. “Well, as you should know very well by now, Mr. Karp, this is not a judgment I like to make.”

“Yeah, right, Doc, it’s a legal term. But in your opinion, I mean, give me a sense of what you can testify to with respect to the defendant’s state of mind when he committed the crimes he’s charged with.”

Perlsteiner seemed to ignore this question. “Yes, an interesting case. Almost, one would say, the sort of case we might have seen in Vienna in the twenties. I review. This young man is raised, the only son, in a secure bourgeois family. The father is an engineer, very vigorous, very correct, quite wealthy. The mother is neurotic, naturally, by turns smothering and bored. She wishes little Jon to be a good boy, but, it seems, boys are not always good, and so she leaves much of his upbringing to Clarice, the servant. Who is a colored woman, of course.”