Resolved, p.18
Resolved, page 18
A male voice says, “Auburn Correctional Facility,” and Marlene says, “Yes, this is Marlene Ciampi and I’m at the district attorney’s office, New York County. I’d like some information about the disposition of the body of a prisoner who died in custody.”
She looks around the office she’s poaching. Yes, that wasn’t a lie—she really is at the district attorney’s office. The man says, “Just a minute, ma’am,” and puts her on hold. While there, she hears a recorded ad encouraging her to apply to become a correctional officer. The cheerful voice mentions pay, pension, and benefits, and omits the regular inundations with urine and feces, but Marlene thinks it sounds pretty good—steady work, not all that demanding, she doesn’t really mind being besmirched with human wastes…and then a man comes on the line wanting to know who she is and what she wants, a deputy warden, no less. Marlene tells him; he says he can’t release that information over the phone, and Marlene says it’s vital to an ongoing investigation and speed is essential and she would be glad to have a subpoena drawn up but hopes that isn’t necessary because she would also have to have the DA send a note to the head of the department of corrections, cc to the governor, wondering about were we all playing on the same criminal justice team or what. The man asks for her number and she gives him the number of the DA and the extension at the desk she has appropriated. He calls back in five minutes, with the name and address of the cousin to whom the late Felix has been delivered, and the funeral home that has actually received the body. Marlene thanks the deputy warden, hangs up, and dials information. Number of Evan Murphy and Sons Morticians, in New York? Sorry, no listing. Again, number of a Bruce Newton, address in Queens? The mechanical voice gives her a number. Interesting, a phony funeral home and a real cousin.
She checks her watch. Time for her appointment. If you had an appointment with the DA you were supposed to wait down in the tiny lobby at the DA wing entrance on a little side street off Foley Square, but Marlene just flashes a ten-year-old ID card and slips past the guard station into the waiting elevator. Dumb trick, but it gives her a little lift. A dumb Marlene trick, Karp would have said.
“Can I help you?”
A woman stands in the doorway of the tiny office, dark, petite, wearing her hair short and her tan linen suit crisp. Marlene slides off the edge of the desk and holds out her hand. “I’m Marlene Ciampi. You must be Ms. Palmisano.” The woman shakes hands with her, but the uncertain expression stays on her face. She stows her briefcase, which Marlene notes is highly polished leather on a shoulder strap, equipped with brass fittings that look as if they’d come off a Clydesdale.
“Did they call up?”
“No, I was in the office for something else and I just came over to sex crimes. I used to work here.”
Marlene can see the wheels spinning. A smile appears on the little pixie face. “Oh, of course. I should have recognized the name. You’re a famous figure.”
“Infamous maybe.” A shared chuckle, a little social small talk. They sit. What can she do for Marlene? Marlene says, “I didn’t mention it to the secretary…I’ve just been retained by Paul Agnelli.”
A puzzled look, the social smile fades. “You mean retained to represent him?”
“Yes, I thought we could talk informally, see where we stand.”
Palmisano nods. She sits stiffly behind her desk, like an old-fashioned schoolteacher facing an errant pupil. “I don’t see where we have much to discuss, Ms. Ciampi. Unless you were thinking about pleading guilty.”
“What, you mean to the one thirty-point-twenty-five?”
“Right, the rape in the third. Cherry Newcombe was fourteen years of age when your client had sex with her in the back of his car. And she looks fourteen. Have you ever seen her?”
“No. But it doesn’t matter what she—”
“Here’s a picture,” Palmisano said, opening a folder on her desk and pulling out an eight-by-ten glossy print. Marlene looked at it. It showed a pretty light-skinned African-American child, her hair in the traditional bunches and a sad expression in her huge liquid eyes. The photo showed her from the waist up, wearing what looked like a fancy little-girl’s party dress, with ruching down the front and puffs at the shoulders. She had no breasts to speak of and looked about twelve.
“When was this taken?” Marlene asked.
“At about the time of the crime in question.”
“The alleged crime. I understand you have good forensics.”
“We have terrific forensics. Everything we need to convict.”
“Uh-huh. The problem is my guy says he didn’t do it.”
Roll of eye. “Well, duh!”
“Yeah, but as you know, the usual defense in a case like this is to say I thought she was eighteen. My guy’s story is he never heard of this girl.”
Palmisano tapped the photo. “Look at this face. No jury would ever believe that anyone would believe this girl was legal, or that any normal man would regard her as a sex object.”
“Yes, but on the other hand, she got into a club where you have to be not just eighteen but twenty-one. Your case is based on her being in the club and the defendant encountering her there and seducing her out into his car. And I guarantee you that if she was in the Red Mill on the night in question, she did not look like she does in that picture. I notice that you don’t present any testimony from anyone at the Red Mill regarding the alleged victim’s presence in the place on the night of, or that she was seen in the company with the defendant, or what she looked like on the night.”
“Why should we? We know she was in his car and we know he had sex with her.”
“Yes, I know you think that, but the problem with it is, I know my client. My client is a sexually active man, even something of a lothario, but what he definitely does not have is short eyes. He’s also something of a mild bigot. Therefore, a little black girl would be his absolutely last choice for a sexual target.”
With a shrug Palmisano replies, “Tastes change.”
“Not that much, they don’t. In fact, as I’m sure you know, the constancy of sexual tastes is the basis of almost all rape investigations. Look, imagine that the basis of a case was that a lifelong committed lesbian had seduced and had passionate sex with a man. And say you had gallons of semen, all the forensics in the world. Wouldn’t you at least wonder if someone was fooling around with the evidence?”
That one hit home, thinks Marlene. The other woman goes white around the mouth, narrow around the eyes. “What are you implying, Ms. Ciampi?”
“I’m not implying anything. I’m wondering why you don’t think this feels all wrong.”
“Maybe because I haven’t sold out,” Palmisano snaps. “I can’t believe you coming up here, trading on your reputation, trying to catch a break for some scuzzball kiddie rapist.” A little shrill here, the last few words.
“Calm down, counsellor,” says Marlene in a quiet voice. “Let’s keep this civilized.”
“Fine! You came, you made your pitch, and now I don’t think there’s anything useful we can say to each other at this point. Have a nice day, Ms. Ciampi.” The woman turns slightly away from Marlene, pulls a fat file from an in-box, arranges a yellow pad and some pencils, and begins ostentatiously to pretend to work.
Marlene doesn’t move. Instead she stares fixedly, silently, at the side of Terry Palmisano’s head. A minute passes. Two. Palmisano whips around, her chair squealing.
“What? Why are you still in my office?”
“Gosh, you know, I really think you’re under the impression I came up here to make an argument for my client.”
“Didn’t you?”
“No, I came up here because you’re making a major error. You’re participating in a frame-up based on rigged evidence. I don’t want to have to demonstrate that in court. I want you to look into it yourself. Is the victim kosher? Did anyone get to her? Is there anyone benefiting from Agnelli taking the fall? And so on. I’m doing you a favor.”
Palmisano rises out of her chair. A bit of dark hair falls out of the mousse’s grip and dangles fetchingly on her forehead. There are blotches of dark red on her cheeks. “Oh, give me a break!” she cries. “What I really want to know is how someone like you sinks into becoming a slimeball shyster. What’s the secret, Marlene? You figure we’ll all roll over and play dead because of hubby up on the eighth floor? ‘Doing me a favor?’ What kind of moron do you think I am?”
“I don’t know what kind of moron you are,” says Marlene, fixing Palmisano with her eye. Palmisano suddenly realizes that Marlene has only one eye, and recalls vague stories of how she lost it. She also recalls other stories about this woman. She wonders if she has gone too far. Marlene continues, “But you need to remember, before you impugn my character, that I was killing sexual predators with my own hands—these hands—while you were still in high school. I invented this office; I hired your boss. The idea that I would for some putative career advantage take on the case of someone I knew to be a child rapist is absurd, and would be seen as absurd by anyone who knows me.”
“Please leave my office!”
Marlene gets to her feet.
“You need to ask around, Terry. There are still plenty of people in the system who’ll tell you you’re way out of line. Meanwhile, take another look at that evidence.”
“Out!” Pointing to the door.
“As for me,” Marlene says, pausing in the doorway, “my only curiosity is whether you are a witting or unwitting abettor of this conspiracy. And I intend to find out which.”
Good exit line, she thinks, and then feels the lash of shame. She hates bullying like that, and descending to the level of made-for-TV movie tough-girl dialogue. She wishes that just once her life would shift of itself from the groove of grand opera to something closer to normality: Gee, thanks for pointing that out, Marlene, you saved us from a massive error. Briefly she considers going to Laura Rachman and putting the squeeze in there, but decides she doesn’t have the heart for another confrontation. And it would be one, if she recalled Laura rightly. She pauses in a lobby cul-de-sac, takes a seat on a pile of cardboard case file crates, unlimbers the cell phone.
Daniel insisted on putting Lucy on the train at South Station, over her objections. Secretly, though, she was glad of it, since it showed he was, beneath the chromium surface of his intellect, a soppy romantic just like her. He helped her up the stairs as if she were wearing a brocade hobble skirt and not a pair of baggy shorts.
“If you dare to run along the platform crying my name and waving a handkerchief like you did last time, I’ll never speak to you again.”
He ignored this. “That’s strange,” he said, gawking, “it’s all in Technicolor. I was expecting black and white. And there should be big whooshes of steam.”
“You’re such a dodo,” she said, leaning into him, putting her face into the hollow of his neck. “If we were married, we would never have to do this. I’m feeling such a pang, now. This is really painful, you know?”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
“Seriously.”
“Yeah, I’ll ride into Manhattan with you and the conductor can marry us, like the captain of a ship. We can have our honeymoon in Providence.”
“That’s right, mock my little-girl dreams, grind them under your booted heel. Someday, when you’re married to the phony blonde goddess of your perfervid imaginings and I’m buried in an obscure convent grave, you’ll think back on this moment, and I hope you feel really, really bad.”
The conductor made the usual announcement.
After they stopped kissing, she said, “Oh, this is awful. You’re awful.”
He stepped down to the platform. “Sell the emeralds in Mombasa,” he called out. “Trust no one! I love you!”
The train pulled out. He ran down the platform after it waving a red bandanna, shouting, “Lucy, Lucy, don’t leave me!”
She got some looks in the car, indulgent ones from an old lady, interested ones from a couple of teenage boys. That was something she’d noticed, when you didn’t have someone interested in you, no one was interested in you, but when someone was, a lot of guys were. Maybe it was pheromones. She rummaged in her bag and brought out a falling-apart Everyman Catullus, and read dirty poetry in Latin all the way into the city.
“Ah, Jimmy, let it ring,” said Nora Raney. “Let the bloody machine pick it up.”
It was Raney’s Regular Day Off, the baby was asleep for once, and Raney was in bed with his lovely wife. He was not quite in media res, but there was heavy breathing and athletic writhing going on. A few years ago, Raney had done an uncharacteristic good Irish son act and taken his mother back to County Clare, the family home place. There was a tedious little Great Famine museum there in Crusheen, which the old lady had dragged Raney off to one fine morning, and there she was, in a green museum guide uniform, Nora Muldoon. And wasn’t it love at first sight? Yes, it was. Although the book on Irish redheads was unfortunately true, and there were blazing fights enough, Raney was happy as a king. Especially in the rack; Raney had been around the block a time or two, but he had not been prepared for the passion that a twenty-six-year-old convent-bred Irish country maiden could generate when at last she got her hands on a lawfully wedded husband.
So he cursed the interruption, but lieutenants of police do not let the phone ring, and policemen’s wives must live with that. He reached across his wife’s marvelous cream-and-pink breasts to the bedside instrument and read the caller ID numbers in the tiny window. Cursing again, he placed the receiver next to his ear. He thought he might caress one of the breasts while he talked but she batted him off with a flurry of blows, and moved as far away from him on the bed as she could.
“This better be good, Ciampi,” he growled.
“Why, did I interrupt something? Is that strenuous breathing I detect? What, Raney, a nooner? You dirty dog!”
“I was mowing the lawn. What d’you have?”
“Well, the funeral home they gave was a fugazy. The next of kinis real on paper, although whether he’s really a cousin or just someone screwing around with us remains to be seen. Anyway, the idea that it was a scam of some kind remains in play. How do you want to handle it?”
“Could you check out the cousin? I want it nailed that it’s a scam before I go in to the bosses, because if he really did go out of a maximum house live in a coffin—holy shit, heads are gonna roll right up to Albany. But I’ll look like a horse’s ass if it turns out it’s a clerical error or some garbage like that.”
“No problem, Raney. I’ll get right on it. Now could you do me one?”
“Anything you want, babe.”
“Owen McKenzie, a third grade at the Five—you know him?”
“To look at. He came on the squad in my last year there. Why?”
“He’s the arresting on a case I’m interested in. What’s he like?”
“Middle of the pack. Not bad, not a superstar, either.”
“Not a Jim Raney.”
“Not. Why’re you interested in his case.”
“It’s a statutory rape case. I’m defending the guy.”
“Oh, fuck, Marlene! You know I can’t screw around with a made case.”
“Hello? What happened to ‘anything, babe’? Besides, I’m not asking you to screw with it. Just call McKenzie and tell him there’s a possibility that it’s a frame, that the evidence is planted, and that he should talk to me. The story is we’re interested in stopping what could be a major embarrassment for the department and to him personally. Plus the possibility of a collar on a corruption case that’d be a lot more juicy than one more pissy little statutory rape clearance.”
A pause. “This is legit, Marlene? I mean, I’m a family man now, it’s not like the wild west old days. I got to worry pension, health insurance…I mean, you’re not presuming on our old friendship to, you know, win a case?”
“Jesus fucking Christ! You, too? What happened, it was on the TV I suddenly became a scumbag ambulance chaser? Look, you want the whole story? I ran into an old pal from the neighborhood, he definitely did not do the crime, he’s totally wrong for it, the forensics are a little too good to be true, and the victim is a choir girl who just happens to hang out in a major meat market for the over-thirty set. The whole thing is yelling ‘frame, frame.’ And, in the extremely improbable event that I’m wrong, I will plead my client to the top count, and no harm done, plus I will kiss your ass in Macy’s window.”
Raney had to laugh. He agreed to call the detective and hung up. His wife was not laughing. She had the sheet pulled up to her neck, her arms akimbo and a blue glare in her eye.
“Sorry, that was business,” he said, and reached, but she slapped his hand away.
“Business, was it? The famous Marlene, was it?”
Raney fell back on his pillow and laced his hands behind his head, gritting his teeth at the ceiling. “Yes, it was. She’s helping me out.”
“Helping you out. It sounds like you’re helping her out. And putting your career at risk in the bargain. Anything, babe?”
“Nora, there is nothing going on between Marlene Ciampi and me.”
“But there used to be.”
“There never was.”
“But you wished it, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I had a lustful attraction for her, okay? That never went anywhere. I’ve told you this a million times.”
“Have her over, then.”
“What?”
“I want to set eyes on the woman across me own table, with you sitting right there. And God help you, James Raney, if you’re not telling the truth, because I’ll know. And here’s Meghan wailing now, and so you’ve missed your chance at me milk white body, and serves you right!”
