Corruption of Blood kac-7 Read online

  Ziller made a mock swipe at his brow and said, "Well, that was a cold douche. Are you always this charming?"

  "No," Karp said, still smiling, "sometimes I'm extremely obnoxious. For example, when I think somebody is not telling me stuff I need to know."

  "Which is certainly not the case here. Look, we're on the same side. I'm from the federal government and I'm here to help you."

  "Help me how?"

  Ziller laughed, "No, it's a joke-the third biggest lie."

  "Meaning?"

  "That's right, you probably haven't heard it eight million times: What are the three biggest lies in the world? Answer: I'll respect you in the morning; the check is in the mail; and I'm from the federal government and I'm here to help you. Ho, ho. Well, I really am here to help you."

  Karp waited, his expression neutral. Ziller took a breath and resumed.

  "Okay, I got this from a buddy of mine who shall remain nameless. He's a staffer with the Church committee."

  "The Senate Intelligence investigation."

  "Yes, the Intelligence investigation. Church is the chair, but Dick Schaller is the leading light. They subpoenaed a shitload of stuff from the CIA and most of it was either trash or blanked out-par for the course with the spooks-but there was one incredibly juicy little package that came through untouched. Some of it bears heavily on the JFK investigation."

  "In what way?"

  "This I don't know, but my guy says it's dynamite."

  "And Schaller is going to give us this stuff?"

  "Yeah. What he wants is to get rid of it. The investigation is finished, the report is out. The last thing he needs is to be sitting on something this big that he didn't use."

  Karp frowned. "Wait a minute. What you're saying is that a U.S. senator had information germane to the assassination of the president and he's playing footsy with it? He's not going public with it immediately?"

  "That's not the point. It was ancillary to the intelligence investigation proper, and if he used it, he'd have had to branch off down a line of investigation he chose not to pursue."

  "Why not?"

  Ziller paused and said meaningfully, "Because in certain quarters of this town, getting excited about who did JFK is considered on the same level as having food stains on your tie or walking around with your fly open."

  "That's good to know," said Karp, and then asked, "So what do I do? Beg him?"

  "No, we'll set up an appointment, you'll go over to the Dirksen Building, you'll chat, talk about the weather, and when you leave the stuff'll be in your briefcase."

  "Great," said Karp. "Is that it?"

  "No, Mark Lane has some dynamite stuff he got on an FOIA request from the FBI, another miracle. There must be a rat in the public information office there," said Ziller. He looked at his watch and beckoned to the waitress for the check. "I have to run; there's a staff meeting over at Rayburn in ten minutes."

  "Wait a second-what's this about Mark Lane and a rat in the FBI?"

  "Yeah, it's a long story. It's another document, and I'm sure Lane'll be around to see us. It's apparently signed by J. Edgar Hoover's own soft, pink hand." He stood up. "I should be able to start full-time next week, if that's okay."

  "Yeah, sure, fine," said Karp, feeling vaguely one-upped and unsure about whether it was fine or not.

  Back in the office, Karp found a message from V.T. on his desk. V.T. himself was in his own dingy room poking into one of several heavy cartons made of a dark, waxy-looking cardboard.

  "What's up, V.T.?"

  "How was your lunch?"

  "I had the cheeseburger special. What's in the boxes?"

  "National Archives," said V.T. "Your research director has been researching, and I had these sent over. It's the photographic stuff, copies they let us have. The actual stuff, they send a guy over and he watches it. I imagine we'll need to do that when we go to hearings."

  "What actual stuff?"

  "Oh, the Rifle. The Bloody Shirt. The Magic Bullet. I went over there this morning. They let me Handle the Items. You get a chill."

  "I bet. So you got all the evidence and autopsy shots?"

  "Those they had. Plus the films. That's what I wanted to show you. I set up a projector already."

  V.T. led the way to a freshly painted bare room down the hall, in the center of which he had a projector set up on a metal typing table. There were two straight chairs on either side of it. The blinds were closed, and when V.T. shut the door and clicked off the lights, the room became quite dark.

  "What are we watching?" asked Karp, sitting in one of the chairs.

  "You're a trained investigator-see if you recognize it."

  V.T. flicked the projector switch and sat down. The white wall opposite lit up. The usual leader numbers counted down and there was a message informing the viewer that this film was copyrighted by Life magazine and a brief look at the seal of the National Archives. Then bright sunlight, a road, a crowd, a motorcade coming down a street, led by motorcycle cops, preceding an open limousine in which two men and two women are waving and smiling.

  Karp realized that he had never actually seen the film shot by Abraham Zapruder on assassination day, although he had seen the grainy color stills made from it. It was different, more chilling, in motion. He asked, "This is the original?"

  "No, that's in a vault at Time-Life. This is the archival copy. Let me slow it down for you."

  V.T. turned a lever and the scene slowed to a nightmare crawl. The Kennedy limo passed behind a large sign and emerged, the president grimaced and snapped both his hands up to his throat, elbows high, then John Connally puffed his cheeks out in pain and slumped to the side, then Kennedy's head exploded in a pink cloud. Jackie scrambled out onto the rear deck of the car, a big Secret Service man leaped up on the rear deck and thrust her back into her seat, the car accelerated and moved away until it vanished under a freeway overpass. The screen went white again and the most famous snuff film ever made was over.

  "Like to see it again?" asked V.T.

  "Yeah. Can you stop it on a particular frame?"

  "No, not with this projector. I want to get us a Moviola for that and for some other film material I have. There are eight-by-ten prints of each frame, of course, but they're not as… compelling as seeing the real thing. I'm also going to go back to the city and take a look at the original. What I hear is that it's got detail you can't see on the archival copies."

  "That's interesting. I mean why take any trouble to make a good copy? It's just the most important piece of film in history. If Zapruder hadn't shot that film, we'd both be back in the city, eating bagels and putting asses in jail. There wouldn't be an investigation. There wouldn't be any single-bullet theory because you wouldn't need one, because without the film to time the bullet impacts and show their order in detail, all you got is a dead guy, a wounded guy, and a rifle in a high building. Let's see it again."

  V.T. rewound it and they watched the Zapruder film again at normal speed. It took twenty-two seconds. They were silent for the few seconds it took to rewind.

  "Again?" asked V.T.

  "Not right now," said Karp. He rose, stretched, and turned on the lights. "We have a photo tech yet?"

  "Uh-huh. I convinced Jim Phelps to join the cause. You don't recognize the name? He's the guy who liberated the Zapruder film and he's done some interesting enhancements. He impressed me. A certain passionate sincerity that ought to balance my own blithe amateurism."

  "I'll need to meet him."

  "I'll set it up. Also, I have that list for the autopsy panel you wanted."

  "Murray's heading it, right?" Newbury bobbed his head in assent, but with a sour expression on his face.

  "What's the matter, you have something against Murray Selig?" Karp asked.

  "No, not as such. The credentials are fine. You can't beat chief medical examiner in New York City. On the other hand, you and he have been pretty tight over the years. His objectivity may be called into question. It might have been better t
o give it to someone with whom we have no prior connection."

  "Come on, Murray's the best in the business. You think he's going to shave the findings to make me happy?"

  V.T. shrugged. "You're the boss. Okay, next: I'm going to set up an index for the materials we're gathering. I'll base it on the index Sylvia Meagher made in sixty-four, of course. We'd really be even further up shit's creek without that. And I'll make a separate list of the stuff we should have that's missing, not that I have very high hopes of finding it." He rose and sighed and ran his hand through his fine pale hair.

  It struck Karp that V.T. had been putting in hours as long as his own and even after a few weeks his face was beginning to show the strain.

  "Fulton's coming on Monday?" V.T. asked.

  "Yeah. He called yesterday. He's got his little mafia of retired cops ready to start as contract investigators. Speaking of which, first thing Monday we should have a meeting. I'll get Selig to come down, and you should get your photo guy in. I'll try to figure out which of the people wandering around here knows what the hell they're doing."

  V.T. nodded unenthusiastically and went to the door. Karp said, "I'd like to see that fist of missing stuff as soon as possible. I'm going over to see the Senate Intelligence Committee. Maybe they'll know about some of it."

  "Tomorrow morning all right?"

  "Sure. Like what kind of stuff, by the way?"

  V.T. shot him a glum look. "Like Kennedy's brain, for starters. And it's probably not in the Dirksen Building."

  Karp read for the rest of the day until his eyes burned. He reached the end of a chapter and threw the heavy book on a pile. He'd gone through three yellow pads making notes on the Warren Report, cross-checking his reading with the critical works also spread out across his desk: Meagher's Accessories after the Fact, Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas, Lane's Rush to Judgment, Epstein's Inquest. He reviewed his notes and distributed more little yellow slips among the critical books. As always, he finished these sessions with an incipient headache and a queasy sensation in his belly.

  Having entered this work without any prejudgment of the Warren Report, he had never concerned himself particularly with its critics. He had read the Times and watched Uncle Walter on CBS like millions of Americans, and the idea that a lone nut had shot the president was perfectly reasonable to him. He also had a deep-seated reluctance to accept the idea of conspiracy on the part of government agencies, even though he had in his career exposed several such conspiracies.

  That was the point, in fact. If he had exposed conspiracies, and he was a law-enforcement official, it was difficult to believe that other law-enforcement officials could not have done likewise. Since none had, in the last decade, it had seemed to him probable that no conspiracy existed. He also had a professional's reluctance to accept the conclusions of amateurs. In his long experience at the DA's office in New York, and in contradiction to the great mass of popular culture pertaining to the subject, no amateur, no Miss Marple, no Poirot, no Sam Spade, no Lew Archer, had ever contributed in the slightest to the solution of a homicide. Private investigators were a joke among the pros he worked with.

  After three weeks of study, however, these beliefs had been seriously eroded, and he had conceived a ferocious resentment against the people associated with the Warren Commission. His reading had shown him what any experienced homicide prosecutor would have gathered. The commission report was not an investigation that might have substituted for a trial of the dead Oswald, but merely a prosecutor's brief, and not a very good one at that. As Crane had suggested at their first meeting, Karp would have laughed out of his office a junior ADA who had waltzed in with something of this quality as prep work for the trial of a street mutt accused of popping a whore.

  He had seen a similar botch any number of times in training ADAs: love at first sight. The cops provide a likely suspect; the kid gathers evidence that aids in convicting that suspect, and shows up at Karp's pretrial meeting with a fat file and a big grin, which grin Karp demolishes by pointing out all the things the defense is going to bring up that the kid didn't think about, or didn't think were important. The autopsy. Did you see the films? Are the wounds consistent with the weapon we say he used? What about that weapon? Chain of evidence? Do you have it, an unbroken written record of everyone who touched it from the time it was found in possession of the defendant to the present instant? You "think" so? Not good enough. What about the witnesses? You got "most of them"? Why not all of them? They didn't see anything or they didn't see what you thought they should have seen? Better apply for a continuance, kid. You're not ready for court.

  And that was what happened on Karp's watch in a cheap street killing of a nobody. This-he glanced in distaste at the nicely bound blue volumes-was an investigation of the murder of a president in front of umpteen thousand people, supervised by the chief justice of the United States. Karp recalled what Bert Crane had said about Warren and his report-that Warren was rusty, that the problem with the report was the peculiar life histories of both the main suspect and the guy who'd shot him. The critics made much of that too, but Karp thought both they and Crane were off the mark. The problem with this thing was that it was a lousy investigation. A third-year law student could've come in off the street and walked Lee Harvey Oswald through its gaping holes.

  Karp rose, put his suit jacket on, grabbed some more reading material, and threw it into an accordion folder. He walked through the deserted office and out into the darkening streets. The Federal Center metro station was a block away, and he took the Red Line train to the Court House stop in Arlington.

  The Federal Gardens Apartments consisted of four two-story red brick buildings with tacky and pretentious white colonial porticoes, despite which they remained easily distinguishable from Mount Vernon. Most of Karp's neighbors appeared to be noncommissioned military on temporary assignments or the kind of working stiffs that dressed in uniforms with embroidered name tags. There was a rusty playground set in the worn grassy quadrangle, which was littered with trash and forgotten plastic toys. There were lots of children in the complex, although Karp, who left for work at seven and returned after dark, saw them mainly on weekends. He heard them often enough, though. The interior walls were thin.

  He entered his apartment and turned on the light. A small living room contained a nubby plaid couch, an easy chair with a reddish flowered slipcover worn at the arms, a scratched blond wood coffee table, a standard lamp with a rusty nylon shade. In the rear of the ground floor there lurked a tiny dim kitchen and a dining alcove with a table of the same blond wood and four chairs. There was a dark stain on the table in the shape of a map of China, where someone had once spilled ink, probably during the second Roosevelt administration. Up a narrow flight of stairs were two bedrooms and a bath. The place was dark and low-ceilinged, but it was cheap and ten minutes by train to Karp's office.

  Cheap was the main thing. Housing prices in the District had exploded in the seventies and Karp had vastly underestimated the cost of keeping two households. As it was likely that he would be unemployed after the committee concluded its work, he had resolved not to touch his small savings until then. He now understood why congressmen took bribes.

  Karp changed into comfortable clothes, went down to the kitchen, and heated up and consumed, without tasting it, a TV dinner. Then he went into the living room, lay down on the couch, and read for ten minutes before falling into a profound sleep.

  He awoke with a start to the sound of a violent argument in the apartment next door. Screaming, breaking things, and an unfamiliar sound, the whining and barking of a dog. The quarrel reached a crescendo and then abruptly terminated with a slamming door and a final crash of something breaking. The whining and barking, however, continued. Karp cursed and checked his watch. He was late for his nightly phone call.

  Marlene was cool when she answered, as if she were speaking to a distant relative.

  "How're things?" he asked.

  "Not bad." And, away from the mouthpi
ece, muffled: "It's Daddy."

  "Got a new husband yet?"

  "Yeah, I just picked this dude off the street, name of Frank or Ralph, something like that-anyway, he's far better than you in every possible way."

  "Good. As long as you're happy."

  "I'm euphoric," she said, and then after a brief pause, "I was on TV yesterday."

  "Yeah? What, you hosted 'Saturday Night Live'?"

  "Almost as good. I talked to the National Association of Attorneys General about rape. One of the locals picked up about twelve seconds of moi for the local news. I did my line about how after the legislature changed the law on corroborative evidence, our conviction rate went up thirty percent."

  "That's great, Marlene! God, Bloom usually hogs that whole thing for his buddies and his own self."

  "Yeah, well apparently, I'm one of Bloom's buddies now," she said.

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah, a bunch of feminists had a rally in front of the courts building and the TV gave them a big play. Apparently, car theft gets something like eighty times the investigative resources that rape gets, and forget about narco. Also there was a series about rape in the Voice and a piece in New York with a couple of juicy horror stories. Mr. Bloom was very glad to have his very own pet feminist talk to the press."

  "So you're famous."

  "Please! Quasi-famous at the most."

  "Like it?"

  A pause. "Yeah. Yeah, I do. It's nice to get some recognition, and I think it'll be good for the program."