Act of Revenge bkamc-11 Read online

  “You’ve talked with her, naturally.”

  “I’ve talked with her, I yelled at her, I made her cry. I came this close”-Mattie held thumb and index finger a pea-diameter apart-“to punching her face out.” She snorted. “That’d be rich, huh? Shelter operator pounds victim.”

  “Why’s she here?” asked Marlene with a surreptitious glance at her watch.

  “Oh, the usual. Chester’s acting up again.”

  “She says.”

  “She’s got a big bruise on her jaw, goddammit!”

  Marlene adopted the calming tone she used with dangerous fanatics, of which there were some few in her life. “Okay. Well, why don’t I go and have a little talk with Chester this afternoon? Maybe we can work things out.”

  “Break his legs.”

  “It’s an option. Was that why you wanted to see me today?”

  “No, it’s this new one. Won’t talk, won’t say who she is. Looks like she’s been pimp-beat, but don’t look like a hooker.”

  “What, with a wire hanger?”

  “Some kind of thin whip anyway. Looks like it’s been going on for a while, the scars. She says he put his cigar out on her ass.”

  “And she won’t say who she is?”

  “No, but-”

  “But me no buts, girl. You got rules, I got rules. You know I don’t touch a client unless she goes for the whole legal business. .”

  “Marlene, just see her. .”

  “. . naming the abuser, prosecuting for assault. .”

  “Marlene, five minutes. She asked if she could see you.”

  “. . and so on. What is this now, the cute puppy school of bodyguarding? If I like her looks, I’ll waive the rules?”

  Mattie turned up her glower a notch and thrust forward her heavy jaw. “Don’t be a bitch, Marlene.”

  “Oh, that’s delightful, coming from you.” She rose and gathered up her bag. “I have to go. I will drive out and see Chester, and then I will go home. I have children. And a husband.”

  Mattie’s face darkened to mahogany, and her heavy brows almost met in the middle. An interesting moment passed, during which both of them realized that, manlike as were some of their doings, they were not in fact men and didn’t have to carry on so. The big woman sucked in breath and said, “Marlene, please. For me. Just see her and maybe she’ll talk to you. If she don’t, no harm. You can just forget her, okay?”

  A request in these terms from Mattie Duran was so unusual as to stun Marlene’s normal prudence, and, of course, she was intrigued.

  “Okay, I’ll see her.”

  Mattie smiled, brightening the room with a show of gold and bright enamel against her dark skin. “Great! You’re a pal, chica. She’s in 37.”

  She would be. Room 37 was the only single room for clients in the EVWS, tiny, in the center of the building, windowless, its doors and walls heavily reinforced. It was the most secure place in the shelter, and was reserved for people that Mattie had determined were under threat from people who knew what they were doing when it came to dispensing lethal violence. Some time back, the shelter had been attacked by a group of actual international terrorists, who had made off with a young girl, and Mattie wanted to make sure it would not happen again.

  Marlene climbed the stairs against the flow of women and children descending for the evening meal. She greeted those she knew, a substantial proportion. Marlene’s role at the EVWS was to represent clients in court, to move them to (they hoped) safe apartments, to train them in self-defense, and to provide her brand of counseling to the significant others. Given Marlene’s rep around town, this often sufficed. Marlene had not lost a client in some years, and her clientele was selected from among the most endangered women in the city, or rather those of the most endangered who had the sense and the nerve to get out.

  The woman who opened the door of 37 to Marlene’s knock was still lovely in the frozen way that some wealthy women adopt, a look that peaked in the Kennedy years. Not a mark was visible on the face, which didn’t mean much. A lot of guys were careful about the face, wanting to preserve the trophy value of the arm piece. Her eyes, a nice china blue, and big ones, showed more mileage around the edges than one might gather from a first look at the face and body. A well-preserved forty, was Marlene’s thought, three days a week at the gym, a few surgical tucks maybe, strict diet, winters in the Islands. She was dressed in a ratty purple sweatshirt and jeans several sizes too large for her, and a pair of cheap tennis shoes, all clearly out of the shelter slop box.

  “You wanted to see me,” said Marlene, and introduced herself, extending a hand. The woman’s grip was soft and hesitant, and her eyes, which Marlene now observed were fuzzy and unfocused, slid away from contact. Oh, pharmaceuticals! thought Marlene. She loved these types.

  The woman did not give her own name, but turned away and sat on the narrow bed. Marlene shut the door and sat beside her, there being nowhere else to sit. The room was tiny, a cell eight feet on a side, holding only a steel cot, a varnished deal bureau, a rag rug, and a rickety night table.

  “So, what do I call you?”

  The woman paused, as if trying to remember. “Vivian,” she said.

  “Last name?”

  The woman shook her head and looked down at the rag rug.

  “Look, I can’t begin to help you unless you talk to me.” Nothing. “I have to have your name at least.” Marlene waited. She observed that the woman had fragments of nail polish still clinging to her nails, which bore the signs of having had the frequent attention of a manicurist. Her hair, too, though lank from a recent washing, showed the mass and shaping of a first-class cut. Marlene felt a pulse of irritation, which she knew she would not have felt had the woman been poor. She stood up and announced, “Okay, sorry, but I’m leaving.”

  “Fein,” said the woman.

  “Fine? You don’t want help? You want me to leave?”

  “No, Fein is the name. My name is Vivian Fein.” The crying started.

  Marlene always said that she was one of the few women in New York for whom both Kleenex and bullets were a deductible business expense. She gave over a wad of the former to stem the drench and waited, making soothing sounds.

  “I’m sorry,” said Vivian Fein, after some minutes. “It’s hard to explain. I was thinking about my father.” She paused, glanced at Marlene in a way that seemed to demand some recognition, as if this father were so well-known as to require no further explanation, and then she blushed and said, “Ah, shit, you must think I’m crazy”-here she uttered a shrill laughlike sound. “Oh, yeah, why would you think that, just because I ran out of my house dressed in a blanket and a pair of panties? Of course, I assume you know all about my father, just because that’s what’s rattling around in my head all the time. Isn’t there a disease where people think they’re transparent? That everyone can see their thoughts?” A spate of silent shaking laughter, dissolving into liquid weeping.

  Marlene adopted a neutral expression and waited. The father thing was interesting. Maybe it wasn’t the S.O. this time, for a change. Or maybe Dad was both-not at all unknown in the business. The Fein woman stopped being semi-hysterical and drew away, and leaned against the wall. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose on Marlene’s wad of tissues. To her surprise, Marlene now found herself subject to an appraising look, with a hint of hardness. A quick recovery. Or the waterworks was an act. Or the woman was deep in tranquilizer psychosis.

  “You don’t look like what I thought you would,” she said.

  “I never do,” said Marlene coolly. “Let’s cut the horseshit, Ms. Fein. I presume you wanted to see me about whoever beat you up. I’ll need his name and details of the incident, plus any information about past abuses, with documentation.”

  “Documentation?” The woman was staring at her as if she were speaking in a foreign tongue.

  “Yes. Visits to the emergency room or private doctors. Calls to the police. Any witnesses to the violence. . I’m sorry, you find this amusing?”
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br />   The woman brought her giggling under control. Definitely pills, thought Marlene. “No, I’m sorry, really. I realize I must seem crazy to you. But. . no, there’s no witnesses. No documentation. And that’s not why. . whew!” Fein took several deep breaths. “We got off on the wrong foot, Ms. Ciampi. I don’t want you to pursue my husband in any way. I want to hire you for something else altogether.”

  Marlene cocked her head, the attitude of disbelief, and also, in her particular case, the way in which she focused attention with her one good eye. “Excuse me. It’s a reasonable assumption. This is a battered women’s shelter you’re in.”

  “Yes, and I do need protection, and I’m incredibly grateful for it, but this is something I have to do, and I can’t do it from home. My husband would not approve, and he’s an extremely watchful and suspicious man.”

  “Uh-huh. And what is it you want to hire me to do?”

  “I want you to investigate the death of my father, Gerald Fein. He was a lawyer. He supposedly committed suicide in 1960.”

  “And you think there’s something suspicious about his death, that it wasn’t a suicide? How did he die?”

  A bleak smile. “I see you’re not a New Yorker.”

  “But I am, born and raised. You mean you think I should recall a suicide twenty-odd years ago, of a-” Marlene clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh, shit! You don’t mean Jumping Jerry was. . Oh, Christ, I’m sorry, that was crude of me.”

  “Oh, please, we’re used to it. Well, I don’t think you ever get used to it, but you learn to live with it. You must have jumped rope to the, whatever, the rhyme, if you were a city kid.”

  “I was a little old. My younger sister did, though. It must have been unbelievably bad for you.”

  “Yes. We loved him very much. And we thought he loved us.”

  Marlene did not know what to say to this, and she did not particularly want to learn. The story now percolated back up from deep storage from where it had lain alongside Brooklyn Dodgers team rosters and the Ozone Park rules for ring-a-levio. And jump-rope rhymes, of course. Gerald Fein had gone to his office building one day and instead of getting off at the 57th floor, where his firm had its suite, he had traveled up to the observation deck, where he had somehow gotten past the barrier and, achieving the actual parapet, had walked into space, thus becoming the last man to jump successfully from the Empire State Building. After some moments of uncomfortable silence Marlene said, “Ah, Ms. Fein, regarding this investigation-I don’t, that is, in my connection with the shelter, I don’t do investigations, except for things like locating a spouse for child-support payment. But my firm, the Osborne Group, has an investigations division. I could put you in touch with them.”

  The woman was shaking her head. “No, I want you to do it.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Fein, but I don’t have the time or the resources to handle a serious investigation into something that happened twenty-three years ago. Osborne does, and I ought to tell you now that if they take the case it’s going to cost you. And, not to be harsh, but you don’t look like you have a whole lot of bucks at your disposal.”

  “I can pay!” the woman cried. Moving like a frightened bird, she darted her hand under the pillow of the narrow bed and snatched out a crumpled paper bag, which rattled as she brought it to her lap, and reached in. Light flashed in her hand.

  “That’s real, I presume,” said Marlene, who could not help a thick swallow at what she saw.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s real. One thing about Sa-my husband, he only buys the best stones. This is a six-and-a-half carat D color VVS2 quality stone in platinum. It’s worth at least a hundred forty grand.”

  There was something about the way this statement popped out of Vivian Fein’s lush little mouth that raised for Marlene the notion that perhaps the deserted hubby was not one of society’s ornaments, though filthy rich, that perhaps Ms. Fein (and what was her married name, after all?) had spent some time around the hard boys. Come to that, Marlene thought further, wasn’t old Jumping Jerry mobbed up in some way? Another reason to avoid additional involvement. She stood up again and pulled her eye away from the fabulous glitter of the ring.

  “You want to put that in a safe, Ms. Fein. Some of the ladies here are fairly hard types. I’ll have someone from our investigations division give you a ring. A call, I mean.”

  “Take it!” said the woman. “You have to, you have to. .” She leaped up and grabbed Marlene’s sleeve, and tried to press the diamond into the pockets of Marlene’s shirt. They shuffled around the floor for a while like a pair of folk dancers from a particularly ungraceful folk, and Marlene thought, absurdly, of her tiny grandmother trying to press packets of leftovers on recalcitrant relatives, both of them doing the same sort of dance. Vivian was again weeping, Marlene saying, “Please. . excuse me. . please,” and wondering whether she would have to get rough to make her escape, when a long, full-throated scream sounded in the hallway outside.

  Vivian froze. All the pink drained from her face, and her eyes showed white all around their blue centers. From outside another yell and the sound of cursing and shrill cries. Vivian jumped back from Marlene and, with crazed stupidity, looked around for somewhere to hide in the tiny cell. In a hoarse, high-pitched whisper she said, “Oh, shit, oh God, oh shit. . it’s him, oh, shit, oh, God. .”

  “Stay here,” Marlene commanded inanely, pulled her pistol from its holster, and stepped out of the room. At the end of the narrow hallway a small crowd of women and kids had formed a yelling circle around what was obviously a fight. Marlene crouched down and looked between the legs of the spectators. As she had expected, one of the combatants, the one on the bottom, getting creamed by a hefty brown woman, was Brenda Nero. Marlene replaced her pistol. Heavy treads on the stairway and here came Mattie Duran at the trot, darkness on her brow. The spectators scattered before her as she pierced the circle and grabbed a handful of each combatant, heaving them to their feet and holding them apart like a pair of squabbling puppies.

  “What the hell is going on here?” she yelled.

  Marlene heard a familiar voice wail, “I didn’t do anything!” Brenda’s old refrain. Brenda never did anything, yet where she dwelt chaos reigned. On her last unlamented visit to the shelter she had, among other stunts, spilled a bottle of nail polish (borrowed without asking, of course) and wiped it up with “an old rag” that proved to be her roommate’s baby’s baptismal dress, the last pathetic remnant of the poor woman’s lost respectability. Marlene imagined it was something like that this time, too, or a remark at just the wrong moment, or a secret casually revealed. What her life with Chester Durrell was like, Marlene could barely imagine, yet she was prepared to talk to Chester about keeping his temper and not going with the fists. In fact, she had to admit, she would rather deal with Chester than with Brenda. Let Mattie deal with Brenda.

  As for Vivian Fein, Marlene suspected that her case made Brenda and Chester look like Ozzie and Harriet. Not interested, was Marlene’s thought, not even in why Vivian Fein So-and-So had decided to split from an abusive man at just that time and look into her father’s long-ago death, and she took the opportunity to slip-slide away, down the stairs and out of the shelter, into a nice, warm, smelly New York purple evening. But of course, now she couldn’t get the damn skipping rhyme out of her head.

  Jumping Jerry jump so high

  Really thought that he could fly

  Jumping Jerry couldn’t wait

  He jumped off the Empire State

  Down and down and down he flew

  Landed on Fifth Avenue

  Hundred-ninety-eighty-seventy-sixty-

  fifty-forty-thirty-twenty

  SPLAT!

  Or alternatively, you could end with the most disgusting possible raspberry noise. She entered her car. The dog made a companionable whine and panted.

  “Don’t ask, Sweets. Just don’t ask,” she said as she cranked up the car and pulled away from the curb. In fact, as she now recalled, she had skipped to it, when
alone with her sister Pat and her younger cousins, and not standing on the dignity of twelve years. She had been a damn good double-dutch skipper, too. All the Ciampis had skipped, including the boys. Her dad had been a welter-weight club fighter in the forties for a couple of years, and skipping was macho training rather than a girl thing at casa Ciampi, where everyone also learned to box. Marlene had kept up training, too. She had a speed bag and a heavy bag set up at home, and she worked out a couple, three times a week-not a Jazzercise girl, Marlene-still including skipping. And, naturally, Marlene had taught her daughter. Lucy still skipped, and was brilliant at it, but she did it in private, not with Mom anymore. It’s just a phase, Marlene thought, trying to generate a little self-comfort. But really, who knew? Who knew, for example, what Jumping Jerry Fein’s spectacular suicide had done to his daughter? Clearly, she was in a marriage made elsewhere than in heaven, but did that follow necessarily from the big jump? Flash forward twenty years-Lucy sitting all beat up in room 37: “Yeah, well, my mom was this hard-rock feminazi with a gun, so I guess I just became a doormat to get back at her.”

  “Is that why I don’t want to do this silly woman’s investigation, Sweety?” she asked. “Because I don’t want to get into it? Some other miserable family. I am a simple person, basically. No, really, don’t laugh! I love my husband, I love my children, even that rotten brat, I don’t try to change the world, I’m not an ideologue, I don’t tear cigarettes out of people’s mouths in restaurants, I don’t throw paint on furs. All I do is I try to keep a tiny fraction of the violent shitheads of the world from hurting their loved ones. This is simple, no? Yell, scream, be depressed, but no hitting, no stabbing, don’t shoot them with guns. It’s kindergarten.”