Corruption of Blood kac-7 Page 11

  V.T. got up and placed the CIA papers back into a folder. "I think I will take the rest of the week off. And perhaps more. Call me when we get a budget."

  "Yeah, right. But aside from this new stuff, what else can we do meanwhile?"

  "Find out who Bishop is," said V.T. "Although how to begin doing that I have no idea. Aside from that, we're dredging through the Senate material, making lists of follow-ups from the Warren stuff, Phelps is trying to get his hands on the autopsy photos and X rays… but it's all indoor sports. We need fresh stuff that hasn't been dragged over a million times, stuff from the field, stuff from new material, like this." He rattled the papers in his hand. "And without a settled budget…"

  "Yeah, I know. We can't do serious investigation."

  "Any word on when we'll get one?"

  "No, but I have a meeting with Crane later today. That's on the list. And I'll tell him about this CIA stuff, too. Maybe he has some ideas."

  V.T. started to leave.

  "Take care of yourself," said Karp. "And be careful with that material. There's only three copies and I don't want any more made."

  "Leaks?"

  "That, and theft."

  V.T. mimed an elaborate terror, clutched the file to his breast, and scurried out crabwise, looking rapidly from side to side over his shoulder.

  When Karp arrived for his meeting, Crane was engrossed in a newspaper, cursing under his breath. "Did you see this shit yet?" he demanded, tossing the paper across his desk. Karp took it and read the obvious story, a short piece above the fold on the front page, headlined "Congressmen Balk on 'Police State' Tactics of Assassination Committee Chief."

  "It's started," Crane said bitterly. "Yesterday I had a closed-session meeting with the full committee. I finally got them to focus on getting this damned show on the road and outlined my approach. Those two old bastards must have been on the horn to the press the minute I walked out of the room."

  Which particular two old bastards Crane referred to, out of the many in Congress, was made clear by the article. Congressmen Peller and McClain expressed "grave alarm" at the plans disclosed by the committee's chief counsel to use a variety of investigative devices, including phone taps, concealed taping, lie detectors, and voice stress analyzers, in the course of the investigation.

  "Big on civil liberties, are they?" Karp asked when he was done reading.

  "Don't make me laugh! Peller was some kind of hanging judge down in Alabama and McClain is an ex-Un-American Activities Committee lawyer. They wouldn't know a civil liberty if it bit off their left nut. No, there's something else going on. I mean it's unique; I've been blasted plenty in the press for things I've done, but I've never been blasted for things I might do. What it is, somebody's running scared and they're putting on the pressure. I wish I knew who it was."

  "I think I might have an idea who," said Karp after a moment's thought, and he told Crane briefly about what was in the new CIA documents. Crane grew increasingly excited as the story unfolded. "That's terrific stuff, Butch. It's our obvious line of inquiry. And you're right-somebody must have leaked to the committee that we've got something solid linking Oswald to the CIA."

  "So our next move is?"

  "Subpoena the bastards. Helms and the rest of them down to the cipher clerks. Grill 'em. Wave their own damn documents in their faces."

  "Why won't they stonewall it, like they did in sixty-three?"

  "Let 'em. We'll hit them with contempt citations. Somebody'll crack, when they're looking at jail time. Not the big boys maybe, but the little fish. This is great! We can start weaving a real net."

  "Um, I hate to bring this up, but with what for money? Weaving is fine, but I got no weavers. I need investigators in the field, with travel and phone and equipment budgets to support them…"

  "That's coming," said Crane irritably. "Bea is working up the formal budget, and I'll submit it to Flores by close of business today. He'll read it over the weekend, present it to the committee next week, and I'd expect closure on it no later than a week from now. I've asked for six and a half million. That'll support nearly two hundred people for both assassination investigations."

  Karp was stunned. "That's a lot of money," he said, thinking that the typical homicide in New York was solved by two good cops with some minimal canvassing and lab work. The JFK business would need more, being spread around the country, but… Tentatively, he suggested, "Will they give us that much? I mean, if we had just a little to start, we could make some progress and then go back for more."

  "That's not the way I work," Crane said with some force. "They asked me what I needed and I told them. If they don't want to shell out, it's on their heads."

  To which Karp generally agreed; still, his political warning lights, dim and unreliable bulbs though they were, had started to flash. Crane was supposed to be the political mastermind of the project, but even Karp understood that a time when you were in trouble in the press was not exactly the best time to ask for a huge shitload of money from a guy who didn't like you in the first place.

  The thin man did not have to wait long at the landing strip. Just after the appointed hour, he heard a droning sound and the DC-4 broke out of the clouds over the mountain and landed in a cloud of red dust. He waited while some crates were unloaded and then entered the plane and strapped himself into an uncomfortable jump seat jutting from the bulkhead.

  The flight to Guatemala City took forty minutes. He walked from the military section of the field to the commercial terminal. There was a ticket waiting for him under the name he gave the girl at the Avianca counter, and he took the regular evening plane to Miami.

  There was a man there waiting for him outside of customs, a short Latin man in sunglasses (though it was night) and a flowered shirt worn outside his pale lemon trousers. They went to a blue van parked outside and drove from the airport down LeJeune Road to Eighth Street, Calle Ocho, the heart of Little Havana, where they turned left. In a few minutes, they arrived at the driveway of a house painted apricot with white trim. The thin man from Guatemala got out of the van and went into the house.

  In the living room, a good-looking older man of about sixty rose from a sofa and extended his hand in greeting.

  "Hello, Bill," he said, smiling. "Welcome to Miami. Long time."

  "Hello, Bishop," said the thin man. "Yes, a long time. Years."

  SEVEN

  "I can't believe I did that!" cried Marlene in anguish. "I yelled at a secretary. In public!"

  She was in private now, in her tatty little office, with Luisa Beckett, her deputy. "What happened?" asked Beckett.

  "Oh, nothing, just stupidity. I was in a rush to get to court to answer motions on the Schaffter thing, People v. Melville, and I just reached into the drawer and grabbed the red-tabbed file that's supposed to have all the motions and responses in it and of course I didn't check it and when I got there I looked and found it was full of Q and A's. No motions."

  "Marva mixed up the tabs again."

  "Right. And so I got chewed out by the judge, who was fucking Hannegan, who hates me anyway, and I had to run back here and get the motions and run back and get there all sweaty like a kid on his first day in criminal courts. And of course got snickered at by all attending, and then I got back here, and Marva and Beverly were lounging around comparing nails, and I guess I just lost it. "Good Christ! I called her a… a…"

  "Not a dumb nigger, I hope," said Beckett.

  "No, a stupid bitch!" wailed Marlene, and pressed her face against her desk, with her arms wrapped around her head.

  "She'll get over it," said Beckett soothingly. "Don't take it so hard. Everybody gets mad sometimes. You've been under a strain."

  Marlene looked up. "Yeah, I have. So have you, so has everybody on the staff, so has fucking Marva, probably, but we don't all carry on like that. Face it, I'm losing my mind."

  "No you're not," said Beckett automatically. Marlene stared at her more closely, searching her face for signs of the sort of patronizing
looks people use to calm the loony down before punching 911. But Beckett seemed merely embarrassed. As well she might be, Marlene thought miserably. One of the very rare black female ADAs, and Marlene's protegee for the past four years, Beckett was a rail-thin, pale tan woman who might have been extruded from Kevlar, and who had never been observed to exhibit any emotion except fury at rapists. Marlene figured there was a personal story behind that, but she had never asked and Luisa had never volunteered. They were close comrades on the job, but not really friends.

  Marlene swallowed hard and said with a sigh, "Oh, I'm being a baby. I didn't mean to lay a trip on you. Just, lately-it's like someone's running fingernails over my blackboard all the time. I can't relax. I'm obsessive. Like this filing system that Marva screwed up. Did I really need it? I don't know-I sort of got on all right before I set it up. I mean, I was never famous for losing stuff. But lately, I feel everything's slipping away, that if I don't keep track of things, minutely, everything will sort of dissolve-I'll dissolve, or crack, or fall into little pieces…"

  Her voice died away. Great! Now Luisa would be positive her boss was crazy. Marlene's face colored with embarrassment. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Beckett, looking at her impassively, as if waiting for this display of weakness to be over so that they could get down to business again. A good prosecutor, Beckett, but not much of a confidante.

  Marlene cleared her throat and said, as briskly as she could manage, "So. You came in here for a reason, right?"

  The relief was clear on Beckett's face as she placed a file on the desk between them. "Yeah, rape and assault. I think the vic might need protection."

  Marlene took the file and skimmed it, which included glancing at several color Polaroids of a forlorn-looking woman, young, blond, pretty, with a fat shiner on one eye, a lumpy jaw, and a cut lip. The woman's name was Maddy Merrill, twenty-three, a dancer and model. According to her statement, the accused, Albert Buonafacci, twenty-four, a tourist from Miami, had picked her up in a bar in the East Forties, bought her a nice dinner, and taken her to some clubs in a white limo. He had seemed like a nice guy. He had driven her back to her place in Chelsea, and she had invited him in for a drink. The nice guy had rounded out a magical Manhattan evening by beating her up and raping her.

  "And the perp is where?" Marlene asked.

  "The cops picked him up at his hotel. His story is she was a pros who tried to rip him off so he slapped her a couple. I got a hundred K bail, but he paid it without a twitch and walked out."

  "What's the problem? Did he threaten her?"

  "No, but she says he's connected, or so he told her. She's nervous about testifying against a Mob guy."

  "But he didn't actually threaten her."

  "Not that she said, but…" Luisa checked and gave Marlene a penetrating look. "What, you have a problem with this? The guy's a bastard, a violent son of a bitch. And he's, um…" She hesitated.

  "He's Italian, right? Hence a mafioso?"

  "That's not what I meant," said Beckett.

  Marlene made a dismissive gesture with her hand. "Yeah, you did. It's okay, we get it all the time, like black men are muggers and black women are welfare sluts. Welcome to the melting pot. Let me say this: I grew up around guys who are now actually with the Mob-not a lot, but some. But for every guy who's really with, there are a dozen sleazebags that talk about how connected they are. So our boy could be one of these. Or he could be for real. Okay, say he's for real, there's no guarantee that he'll carry out on a threat. A threat is business, and the dons are not hot on mixing business with pleasure, and he'd be a lot more scared of them than he is of us. Meanwhile, there's not even a solid threat, so…"

  "No protection?"

  "Not now," said Marlene; and observing that Beckett's fine-boned face was solidifying like a pour of epoxy, she added, "Come on, man! We have women being actively stalked and we got no place to put them."

  Luisa stood up and gathered up the case file. "Thanks for the lecture on the Mob," she said bitterly. "I'll pass it on to Ms. Merrill. I'm sure it'll make her feel a lot better."

  "Oh, Luisa, for crying out loud…," said Marlene to the back of the departing woman. The door slammed shut.

  A good day, thought Marlene: I've alienated my secretary and my deputy. What next?

  But next, as it turned out, was a nice lift. The DA called her directly, an event about as rare as a thank-you from a New York cabbie:

  "Marlene? Sandy Bloom. Are you busy?"

  "Umm…"

  "If you can spare a moment, I'd like you to drop by. I'm having an interesting meeting and I'd like your views."

  It happened that Marlene could just spare a moment for the district attorney. She stopped by the ladies' to make sure that her face and outfit bore inspection, and of course, to check that her glassie was straight in its socket. Glass eyes tend to rotate and you have to check them often, unless you want to depend on the horrified looks of your interlocutors to cue you in that something's wrong. Marlene claimed she was used to the thing and it didn't bother her. This was a lie: besides the hair that fell artfully over her bad right eye, she was careful in public to obscure that side of her face with various practiced gestures and postures.

  There were two other people sitting in the comfortable brown leather chairs in Bloom's office when Marlene arrived, both of whom were vaguely familiar: a thin, spectacled man and a blocky, fair-haired woman in a denim suit. The DA was behind his desk, leaning backward in his thronelike judge's chair. He stopped talking, warmly beckoned Marlene over to them, and made the introductions. The man was a prominent criminal justice scholar working on a project for the Vera Institute of Justice. The woman was the president of the New York State chapter of a national women's organization. Marlene had seen both of them recently on a talk segment of the "Today" show.

  "I was just telling Paul and Beth about you, Marlene," said the DA, gesturing expansively toward her. "This woman has revolutionized the prosecution of sex crimes in Manhattan."

  Marlene bobbed her head at the fatuous remark, and the two celebrities beamed at her.

  Paul said, "We were just talking about the possibility of identifying potentially violent sex offenders. We have some data that show violent sex offenders often have a history of misdemeanor arrests-public nuisance, exposure, sexual battery-before they become violent, and we were exploring the possibility of a program to track these people from their first appearance in the criminal courts."

  They all looked at Marlene, the revolutionary, for a brilliant response. Though feeling short on brilliance today, Marlene understood her new role as the DA's pet smart girl. She paused for a moment to order her thoughts, and then said, "Well, that's an interesting idea, but just because some violent sex offenders started small and went on to bigger things doesn't mean all of them, or even the worst of them, did. Ted Bundy was clean as a whistle. So was John Wayne Gacy. The main problem we've had is that not potential but actual rapists walk on misdemeanor charges because we can't nail them for a rape, or because we haven't felt like going to trial. They plead to misdemeanor sexual abuse, or 130.20, sexual misconduct, which is a class A misdemeanor. They might get off with time served or serve at the most sixty days."

  The woman said, "Yes, but if we had some way of tracking them, we could either get them into some kind of enforced treatment program, or, I don't know, warn people about them."

  Marlene nodded impatiently. "Yes, we could, if the law were changed, but the problem is we have no basis for assuming that these guys are any sicker than the average mugger, or that therapy would do any good. As far as tracking them, yeah…" She paused. An interesting notion had just popped into her head. "If the same people, the same staff of prosecutors, dealt with misdemeanor sex crimes in the criminal courts bureaus as well as the felonies, maybe then we'd get some perspective, maybe then we wouldn't let these guys walk when they've already raped or abused some people. I mean, it wouldn't be just another case on the calendar: like"-Marlene here imitated the
monotone of a court officer calling out cases-"burglary, plead to trespass, bang, next case; dope dealing, plead to possession, bang, next case; rape, plead to sexual abuse two, bang, next case. It'd be more like, well, homicide. Something that stood out."

  The two visitors were interested in this prospect, of course, and they discussed at some length how it might work. During this interchange, Marlene cast an eye on the district attorney, and got a knowing and appreciative look. What the visitors didn't quite understand was that the proposed unit that they were discussing, that would deal with sex cases in the criminal courts bureau as well as more serious offenses, would naturally be Marlene's unit, which would require perhaps a tripling of her staff. But the DA understood it very well.

  The meeting wound down, with the usual promises to keep in touch. As the two rape fans were leaving, Bloom motioned Marlene to stay behind. He said, "That was very good, Marlene. With you around, I got my ass covered on sex." He grinned charmingly, showing the neat white perfect teeth of the wealthy, and patted her arm. "And real tricky too," he continued. "You know, you set me up a little there."

  She felt her face heat. "I didn't mean-," she began, but Bloom interrupted with a gesture.

  "No, I understand. And I tend to agree with you. But what we're talking about here is a fairly massive reorganization of staff. The criminal courts bureau chief is going to be involved, and maybe the bench too. I'm going to have to stroke a lot of guys' balls on this one."