They had valet parking at the Dobbs house. The Karps alighted from the T-bird nonchalantly, as if they always went to parties with valet parking, and let the teenage kid drive it away. The house was a three-story, red brick, Federal-style structure, with two generous wings, its face embellished with white trim and a white-columned portico, set on two acres of landscaped grounds. There were several outbuildings, each with a white spire and a weathercock.
Past the door, in the circular entrance hall under the glittering brass-and-glass chandelier, Butch and Marlene had their coats taken by a maid in uniform—no throwing on the bed for the Dobbses—and were greeted by a small woman who introduced herself as Maggie Dobbs. As Marlene shook the proffered hand she noticed the woman’s eyes widen and her smile stiffen as she absorbed what Marlene was wearing. Marlene absorbed Mrs. Dobbs too: a fine-boned woman not much older than herself, with delicate china-doll features, a shining blond Dutch boy, and blue eyes to match. She was wearing a jacket and trousers outfit of vaguely oriental cut, in embroidered yellow brocade. Marlene judged the outfit stylish, and absurdly expensive, but somehow Maggie Dobbs failed to bring it off in the manner that Halston, or whoever, had intended. The vivid yellow washed out her pale coloring, and besides that there was something in her eyes, a faintheartedness surprising in a good-looking woman, the chatelaine of this rich place, a look more comprehensible in an unattractive teenager on the wallflower line at the junior prom.
“I love your outfit,” said Marlene.
The woman colored and murmured, “Thank you, I … ah …” She reached for a return compliment, baffled.
Marlene said gaily, “Oh, it’s just something I threw together,” and tripped off to the brightly lit living room, where the dozen or so guests had gathered for drinks before dinner.
A small bar had been set up in one corner of the room—a cloth-covered table with a young black man in attendance—and Marlene headed straight for it. She needed a drink; her bravado had quite collapsed upon entering the room and checking out the people gathered there. The men were all in early middle age, dressed in good dark suits, and all had the easy confidence that comes from wielding political power. The women were all suited in various ways as well; they had obviously all just come from important jobs—all, that is, except the hostess in her unfortunate golden pj’s. Aside from the expensive clothes, the women were a mixed bunch. Some were gorgeous, others were plain, and there were two enormously fat ones. It was clear that they had not been invited because of their looks or charm, but because of who they were. This should have delighted Marlene the feminist, but it did not—another source of shame. It had been easy, she realized, to be blithe about status when one had it. It shocked her how different she felt now, being nobody.
Marlene threw back half her iced vodka in a gulp, and felt Karp come up and take her arm from behind. She was being introduced to a good-looking man with sandy hair, their host. Andy Hardy, with an edge, Marlene thought. Another introduction, this time to Bert Crane, hearty and smooth. Crane told her how great Karp was. Then she was passed off to the nearest group, two women and a bald, short man with thick glasses. All of them were senior staff on committees Dobbs had an interest in. In a few moments, Karp was led away by Congressman Dobbs and Crane.
Marlene had been introduced simply as Karp’s wife, which was new and which she did not much appreciate, but there it was. There was some more commentary about how good everyone thought Karp was and how they had heard so much about him.
“What do you do?” asked one of the women.
“I’m a lawyer,” said Marlene.
The woman smiled. They all did. “How unusual!” she said humorously. “Who with?”
“Nobody,” said Marlene. “My daughter’s four and I’m at home with her.”
“Do you live around here?” asked the other woman. “There’s some wonderful day care in McLean.”
“No, we have a furnished apartment off Wilson in Arlington. And I’m planning to stay home with her.”
The smiles jelled. Then they began to talk again, not exactly ignoring Marlene as if she weren’t there, but each time she made a comment there was a brief pause and then the conversation would start up again as if she hadn’t said anything. This had never happened to her before. That she was smart, that she had graduated from Yale Law School, that she had something to say, apparently did not count anymore, not with these people. She was “wife-of,” and nothing else, occupying the capital’s lowest status rung. She looked over to where Maggie Dobbs was being gracious to a group of men. The men laughed at something she had said. There was the exception; if she had a house like this one, she could give big, expensive parties, and then she would be a person again.
Marlene had to think about this, the realization that for the indefinite future the only people who would talk to her would be her daughter and nannies. Such thoughts required a drink. Another vodka, please. And another.
A bell rang, an actual dinner gong. Everyone trooped into the dining room. Marlene caught a blurry glimpse of her husband talking to Dobbs and Crane. Karp waved to her, and she nodded briefly back to him. He had a worried, distracted look.
There were little place cards. Marlene found hers down at the end of the table, far from the head, where Dobbs and Crane and Karp sat, interspersed with some of the power women. The people at her end seemed distinctly junior, congressional staffers of both sexes, and, of course, Maggie Dobbs at the foot. Marlene had never been to a dinner party like this in a private home; she had scarcely imagined that they still went on, but here she was.
A caterer had, of course, been engaged: no guests hanging around the kitchen and helping with the guacamole. Black men in maroon monkey jackets served turtle soup, then a radicchio salad, then little birds en brochette, with stuffed potatoes and some sort of bland orange vegetable sculpted into flower shapes. The servers also circulated with chardonnay; Marlene politely drank when they filled her glass, which was often.
Animated talk flowed around her. After a few perfunctory attempts to engage her in their conversation, the two men on her flanks chatted for a while to each other around her as if she were a pillar at a hockey game.
The dessert was served, a banana mousse. The conversation between the two men having flagged, the one on Marlene’s good side turned his attention to her, and seemed to notice for the first time that, although unimportant, and absurdly dressed, she was stunning. He was a fair, small, even-featured man of about thirty with a supercilious eye. Marlene recalled having been introduced to him; Jim Something.
“So,” he began, “what do you do in the government? No, let me guess—something arty, National Gallery? Kennedy Center?”
“I’m a housewife,” said Marlene in a dull, low voice.
“Please! Nobody’s a housewife anymore. You’re highly decorative. Fix yourself up a little and you could walk into any front office in town and get hired. Where did you go to school?”
“Smith.”
“Oooh, very Seven Sis! And you majored in marriage?”
“I guess.”
“Well, it’s never too late, my dear,” said the man in a hearty and patronizing tone. “We need to get your juices flowing again. You don’t want to be a Potomac widow, getting wan and shriveled while hubby conquers the world. I’m sure some deep fire still burns within that domestic exterior.” He reached over and kneaded her arm.
She froze, then looked up from her dessert into his watery blue eyes. “Oh? How can you tell?”
“Men know,” he said. “They can sense the heat.”
“Can they? Sense the heat. Can you sense the heat?” The booze seemed to hit her all at once and she laughed, louder than was usual at such tables. “Now I know who you remind me of,” she cried to her dinner companion. “God! I can’t remember his name. I remember the name of the Kool-Pop artist, though. Mary Ellen Batesy.”
The man looked at Marlene, polite confusion on his face. “Pardon, who is …”
“Mary Ellen Batesy. A big blond whore, walked the stroll on West Street and when she got a little old for it went into specialty work. You saying ‘heat’ was what reminded me. See, some men like hot women, as you were so suavely informing me, but others don’t. Others like to fuck dead women, and in the Kool-Pop trade, also they call it a slab job. See, the whore usually gets a couple three bags of ice and takes a bath in them to get the skin temperature down and get her looking blue, and then she stuffs the Kool-Pops up her snatch, and asshole and in her mouth—not the same Kool-Pop, three different Kool-Pops, until they melt, according to Mary Ellen. Anyway, Mary Ellen had this gurney in her crib, just like in the morgue, and when she was chilled down and ready, she’d lie on it and cover herself with a white sheet and the john would sneak in, and jump on her and do his thing. Mary Ellen said that aside from the risk of getting pneumonia it was a better gig than regular whoring, where they wanted you to pretend you liked it. And more money too.”
Marlene was now talking in quite a loud voice, the sort of voice they developed in New York City to cut through the screaming of badly ground subway car wheels, and her end of the table had grown silent. People had stopped eating their mousse; they were all staring at Marlene.
“But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about, not Mary Ellen, but the guy. Christ! What was his name—Osgood, Oscar, Oswald …” Then she raised her voice to a still higher pitch and shouted down to the other end of the long table, “Butch! What was that guy who liked to fuck dead women? With the rent-a-cooler. Oscar somebody?”
Now the whole table fell silent, and into this silence, Karp’s voice said evenly, “Oscar Sobell.”
“Oscar Sobell!” shrieked Marlene. “Yeah, Oscar. Whatta guy!” She looked right at Jim Something and said, “Yeah, Oscar. He was a little washed-out blondie like you, maybe a little more chin than you have. Oscar was one of Mary Ellen’s clients, only after a while it started to get old because as good as Mary Ellen was, she wasn’t really dead. I mean, he knew that. Also, Oscar was blowing a good chunk of his paycheck on Mary Ellen because she got a hundred a pop for a slab job, plus ice. So, what he did, he rented a cold locker, like people do for their furs and all, and then he went out and found a regular girl and he customized her for his special needs. Well, great, except he had to sort of wear a parka while he got his rocks off, which was inconvenient, but the real problem was—how to put this delicately … ?”
“Say, Marlene … ,” Karp rumbled from down the table. She ignored him. A murmur from the guests had begun.
“… delicately, as I was saying,” she declaimed in her powerful, clear, courtroom voice, “the problem was that after a few months, his girlfriend was becoming, ah, gummy, from all the jelled semen, which apparently cut into the quality of the experience he was after. So he racked her, hung her up by the mouth on one of the hooks they supplied there, and went out to the stroll and customized another one. And another one, and another one. Well, what happened then is that the warehouse made an error and gave Oscar’s key by mistake to a nice old lady who wanted to store her minks, and of course she complained to the management, because naturally she didn’t want to share her cold space with a pervert and four dead whores, you could see why, and they called the cops. Oscar had, needless to say, given a phony name and address, and it was all over the papers, so Oscar didn’t come back to the warehouse. The police were baffled, as they say. They circulated a description to the other cold-storage places, but no luck. Oscar didn’t show. Which was when the kid herself here thought of Mary Ellen Batesy and the other ladies who specialized in slab jobs. There are more of them than you’d think. Anyway, Mary Ellen remembered Oscar. And there he was at his place on Staten Island; he’d just ordered a big cold locker for his basement. My brilliant and famous husband, only he wasn’t my husband then, just screwing me on the side, put him away for consecutive life terms. And a good thing too, because, who knows, with his tastes, he might have started on Jewish American princesses… .”
“Marlene … ,” said Karp, more sharply. The table remained silent except for embarrassed whispers.
Marlene paused, not because of Karp’s interruption, but because of the insistent nausea rising from her stomach, the result of pouring unaccustomed rich food and a lot of alcohol, quickly drunk, into the seething acids of despair.
“Silly me,” she said in a lower voice, “I’ve monopolized the conversation again.” She rose shakily and pushed back her chair with a rattle that now seemed as loud as gunfire. “Be right back,” she muttered, and stumbled out of the room.
Dinner resumed in her wake as if nothing had happened, and the truth is that such scenes are not at all unusual in the more refined precincts of the capital. Washington, as Alice Roosevelt once remarked, is full of brilliant men and the women they married when they were very young. Being a wife-of is a harder career than one might imagine, and many of these women, suited by nature, if not society, for different work, get drunk a good deal as a result, sometimes publicly. Remarkably, this nearly always generates substantial sympathy, not for them, but for their husbands.
Everyone at the party was, in fact, especially nice to Karp after dinner. The guests returned to the living room, where coffee and after-dinner drinks were served. Karp had decided not to think about Marlene for a while. No one seemed particularly concerned about her behavior, and Karp was, in truth, happy that it hadn’t been worse. That Marlene could be a gigantic pain in the ass, he well knew, and he accepted it as a fact of nature. That her behavior could have a specific cause never entered his mind.
Besides, he was enjoying himself. There is a form of flattery worked on people in important positions in Washington that only a saint well advanced in humility will be able to resist; sadly, few of these are summoned to government service. Karp was perhaps less susceptible than most, but still far from Zion.
Now he sat comfortably on a love seat with an intelligent, pixie-faced woman in her early forties. The woman, whose name was Felicity McDowell, had her silver-blond hair cut short and was dressed in a splendid blue silk pants outfit that had not obviously been thrown together at the last moment, nor was she drunk and disorderly. They had a nice conversation. She knew who Karp was, of course, not just his current job, but his former one. She had lived in New York and was familiar with some of his more spectacular cases. Admiration flowed. She was a journalist and a documentary filmmaker. The possibility of doing a film about the DA’s work arose. Difficulties in doing this were explored. Interesting possibilities were dangled.
The conversation turned, as if reluctantly, from Karp’s glory to her own modest achievements. McDowell had just completed a feature on, of all people, the Lee Oswalds.
“Oh?” said Karp when she announced this. “It must have been hard to do.”
“You mean Marina? Oh, no, she’s quite good with her English now. She’s a smart woman, actually. Lee didn’t want her to learn any English, you know. He was afraid it would loosen her attachment to him.”
“No, actually, I meant Oswald. His character. A very strange and complex man.”
“You’re joking,” she replied with a charming laugh. “He was a … a … putz—is that the right word? A nonentity. Nobody at home.”
“Maybe. A guy I work with says if he was such a schmuck, he didn’t kill the president, and if he did kill the president, he wasn’t such a schmuck.”
She laughed again and put her hand casually on his knee. “Oh, God! Please don’t tell me you’re one of those!”
“One of what?”
“An assassination nut, silly.”
Karp said, with some stiffness, “Well … yeah, I guess. I guess I’m supposed to be a kind of official assassination nut.”
“So, you honestly don’t think Oswald did it? Forget about the obvious defects of Warren. Let’s say it was a sloppy investigation because everyone was running around terrified. The fact remains that they came up with the right guy.”
Karp shrugged. “Well, they haven’t proven it by me. How come you’re so sure?”
“Because I’m a journalist and this is the story of the millennium. If there was anything there that was real, that couldn’t be interpreted in sixteen different ways, then serious journalists would have dug it out within weeks of the assassination.”
“Wait a minute!” Karp objected. “There are dozens, hundreds, of books digging at the thing.”
“No, I meant by serious journalists. All these buffs—they’re all lawyers, or politicians, or sociologists, or historians. Or ‘experts.’ None of them ever made a dime out of any writing except writing about the assassination. There’s not a real hard-rock working journalist in there. Why? Because journalists are suspicious—the good ones, anyway. They check their facts. And they can read people.”
She looked hard at Karp. “Just like I can see you don’t believe me—you’re becoming a conspiracy buff yourself.” She smiled at Karp in a way he didn’t much like, the smile of a mom patronizing a preschooler.
“Look,” she said, “I spent hours and hours and hours with Marina Oswald. This woman is just what she says she is. Lee Oswald is just what she says he was and what every reliable record of him says he was—a bum with delusions. He’s exactly the kind of person who has been the killer in every presidential assassination: Booth, the failed actor and disgruntled southerner; Guiteau, a petty office seeker with a grievance against authority; Czolgosz, an anarchist, whatever that means. Zangara, the guy who tried to kill FDR, when they asked him why he did it, he said he had pains in his stomach. Oswald was cut from exactly the same cloth. Believe me, I spent some time with the man, so I know.”
“You knew Oswald?”
“ ‘Knew’ is a little strong. I was a stringer for the Post in New Orleans in September 1963, when he was arrested and went on the radio to debate the anti-Castro Cuban. The peak of his life until then—people actually paying attention to him, the little shit. I interviewed him after the program, but he was so boring and inane that I didn’t bother to write it up. What was interesting was what he told me about his wife. I thought it might be interesting to talk to a Russian defector—a defectoress, actually. I was thinking of a piece for the woman’s page as we then called it, so I went to Dallas and looked her up. I did the piece, but the paper didn’t use it, and weren’t they sorry the following month, when Lee pulled the trigger! In any case, after the hassle died down and the FBI quit holding her hand, I renewed our connection, and did some articles and now this film.” She laughed. “Who am I to criticize? I’ve done pretty well myself off the JFK hit.”
They were silent for a moment, and then Karp asked, “And you have no problem with all the discrepancies, the lost evidence, the—I’ll say apparent—cover-ups?”
“Problems? Of course I have problems!” she replied sharply. “Who wouldn’t? Do I know that Lee never talked to anyone who worked for someone who worked for the CIA or the FBI? That his name isn’t stuck on some obscure file? Of course not! Christ! The Hosty thing alone would cause conniptions. FBI agent Hosty visits the assassin a couple weeks before the killing, and he knows he’s a nut, who threatens violence, and a political wacko, who just happens to work in a place that’s on the president’s motorcade route, and nobody thinks to check this guy out while the big man is in town? So were there cover-ups? Probably. But not of conspiracy; the cover-ups were about incompetence. Like I said, Warren messed up, my boy, messed up big-time, but they got the story right.”
“Well, there I can’t agree with you. Obviously, right? I mean that’s what the House investigation is for, isn’t it? To figure out what went wrong with Warren, and fix it.”
She looked surprised. “Surely you don’t believe that? In fact, the point of your committee is to dispose of the criticisms of Warren and come up with approximately the same results.”
Karp bridled and snapped, “That’s not what Bert Crane thinks.”
“Yes, I know,” McDowell said darkly. “That’s the problem. Look—you seem like a very nice man, honest and forthright and all that, so I’m going to give you some free advice. Don’t hitch your wagon to a falling star. Hello, Blake.”
The man standing over them and smiling was large and built on an angular plan. His shoulders were squared off and broad, his jaw was sharply drawn, there was a sharp fine dividing a short crop of crinkly black hair, graying on the side, from a flat, smooth forehead. Below that were thick eyebrows straight across and black squarish glasses like Clark Kent’s. The lines in his face and his wide mouth seemed also to run rectilinearly, as if drawn on graph paper. He wore a sharply cut, expensive dark suit, pinstriped, of course. Karp knew who he was: next to Jack Anderson and perhaps James Reston, Blake Harrison was at the time the most influential political newspaper columnist in the country.
Harrison said, smiling, “Hello, yourself, Felicity,” and then said his name to Karp and stuck out his hand. Karp rose and took it, and said his own name.
Harrison said, still smiling, “Felicity, would you mind terribly if I poached a bit? I have to get somewhere and I do need to have a few words with Mr. Karp here.”
“Not at all,” said McDowell, her smile a trifle forced. “Nice talking to you, Butch.”
Karp nodded and voiced similar sentiments, and was led away, noticing that no one had asked him. Apparently, when Blake Harrison wanted to talk to you, it was not a negotiable issue.
Karp followed Harrison out of the crowded living room and down a hallway. Harrison was hailed by several people on the way, and returned their greetings, but refused to stay for conversation. He also seemed to know his way around the Dobbs house. They reached a doorway and Harrison ushered Karp into a small room that appeared to be some kind of den: wooden bookshelves along one wall, a desk, an elaborate stereo system, sporting prints and political cartoons on another wall, two large red leather library chairs flanking a coffee table piled with magazines. Harrison sat in one of the chairs and propped his feet up on the coffee table, seeming quite at home. He motioned Karp into the other.
Harrison said, “So … Butch. They still call you Butch, don’t they?”
“Or worse.”
Harrison smiled briefly. “Yes, I’ll bet. I’m Blake, and they call me worse things than they probably call you. Well, I could butter you up with tales of what I’ve heard about your reputation, but knowing that reputation as I do, I know that you have no use for flattery. So I’ll get to the point. Your boss is going down. It may be this week or the next one, I don’t know, but for sure he’s finished. The question—”
“Why?” Karp interrupted. “What’s he done?”
Harrison smiled, the same smile that McDowell had given him, the patient smile of an adult addressing the question of a child. “Why does anyone fail in Washington? He has not made happy the people he ought to have made happy, and he has made unhappy the people he ought not to have made unhappy.”
“I thought he was supposed to run an honest investigation, not put on A Chorus Line. Who exactly are these people he’s pissed off?”
“His committee, for one. Elements of the press.”
“You mean Flores? He’s a jerk.”
Harrison chuckled. “Doubtless, but that does not disqualify one from a position of power in Washington. No, Bert made a very serious mistake in accepting this invitation to speak before the caucus without clearing it with Flores. Flores is hurt and he’s going to lash out. Bert could have opposed him if he himself was in a position of unassailable power or if his own record were absolutely clean, but such is not, apparently, the case.”
“Crane is dirty? That’s bullshit!”
“Let’s just say that there’s a cloud. On Monday, two major papers, one in Philadelphia and one in Washington, will break stories about Bert Crane. The Philadelphia story will explore unsavory connections between Crane and various organized-crime figures that took place while he was a DA in Philly. He let a mobster named Johnny Serrano off on a corruption charge and sometime later there were contributions made to his campaign from a union known to be influenced by the Serrano crime family. The Washington story will focus on the operations of the committee staff. Apparently a good deal of money has been spent without legal authorization, and the comptroller general is starting an investigation.”
Stunned, Karp paused a moment before responding, aware that the other man was examining his reaction. “That’s ridiculous!” he said at last. “Crane never did any deal with mob guys. And the only money that’s been spent is on essential items for the office. What, they think he’s ripping off paper clips?”
“That’s not the point. It is a fact of political life that you can survive accusations if you have a strong political base, or, if you have a weak base you can survive by ensuring that no accusations are made against you—as I said, by making the necessary people happy. But Crane has made people angry without a political base, and that’s fatal.”
“I can’t believe this,” replied Karp stubbornly.
“For the sake of argument, then, assume he’ll be forced out. The question I wanted to raise with you, Butch, has to do with your position.”
“My position?”
“Yes. Assuming Bert has to go.”
“Well, obviously, I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t agree that Bert’s going.”
Harrison waved a dismissive hand. “Yes, yes, very loyal, of course, but let’s cut the crap. Crane is finished and the only problem that remains is who replaces him. I think you’d be ideal. No—let me finish. One, you’re as apolitical as a lamppost. That’s essential. The report the committee writes is going to have to be salable to the public at large and that means no detectable political influence. Two, I’ve checked you out pretty thoroughly, and I’ve been unable to find a cloud. In fact, on several occasions you’ve dug up nasty stuff that could’ve been used to good advantage in building a career for yourself and you haven’t used any of it. Very commendable, and useful in the present case. Incorruptibility is a salable commodity in this town, but it’s as perishable as oysters. It requires, let us say, a certain protective shield. Let’s say that I can arrange such a shield.”
“I don’t understand,” said Karp, and he meant it.
“What I mean is that Crane’s job is yours, if you want it. If we can come to some understanding.”
“Which would be what?”
Harrison checked and grinned and fanned his hand in front of his face. “My God, such frankness! It takes my breath away. Okay, I’ll be blunt, as much as it violates my sensibilities. You take Crane’s job. I’ll use my influence and the influence of people who owe me favors to make sure you get it. I will ensure cover for you in the press while you do your work. In return, you will provide me with a first look at everything you turn up. Also, if you’re as smart as you seem to be, you’d also accept such political guidance as I may offer from time to time. How is that? Blunt enough?”
“Yeah. Tell me, you’re a reporter—how come you can offer political guidance?”
Harrison laughed at that. “How? My friend, you might as well ask how a telephone can transmit stock market tips. I am a conduit for powerful people. They tell me things. I tell them things. Everyone knows that, which is why my column gets read, and why it’s influential. It’s the way this town works, as I’m sure you’ll find out, if you survive. So—what do you say?”
“I say I’ll think about it.”
Harrison nodded his cube of a head several times. “Good. But don’t take too long. The train is pulling out of the station and those who aren’t on it will be left behind.”
Karp was tired of this sort of advice. He said, “Well, Blake, the fact is that I really don’t give two shits about whether I’m on the train or not. I came here to find out what the truth was about the Kennedy assassination, which is a legal and forensic investigation, a job that, with all due respect, I don’t need any advice from you about. If I can do that, fine. If I can’t, for whatever reason, I’m out of here.”
Harrison rolled his eyes and brought his fist angrily down on his knee. “The truth! Yes, of course you want the truth. Don’t you think that’s what I want too? I was in Dallas when Jack was shot. I was at Parkland when they brought him in with his brains spilling out of his head. Nobody ever forgets something like that. My point, if you’d care to listen, is that without some experienced political guidance and some cover, you will not get to the truth. You will not be allowed to. So the choice I put to you is whether you want to remain a ‘legal and forensic’ choirboy with an unsullied heart, and get kicked out on your ass, or whether you want to play this game and win. Let me know when you make up your mind which.”
He rose from his chair and stalked out of the room, leaving Karp sitting there thinking about what Clay Fulton had said those many weeks ago: indeed, he was way over his head. And in muddy water too.
After vomiting copiously in a primrose yellow toilet, Marlene washed her face, dried herself on one of the charming flowered guest towels, and went looking for a place to lie low until the wretched party had reached its end and she could sneak out.
She walked away from the sound of well-informed conversation, down a darkened hallway and through a door. She found herself in an echoing room with tall windows and a flagstoned floor, smelling oddly of both earth and chlorine. The windows on the left side were lit, those to the right, dark. To the right, then, obviously a pool; to the left a greenhouse, or, she supposed one should say, a conservatory. There was a door and she went through it.
The room was large, about fifty by thirty feet, and had one wall all of glass, which by night threw back the reflection of the overhead fluorescents and the variously shaded greens of the plants, mingled with the brighter hues of their blossoms. There were large specimens of the usual indoor plants—impatiens and prayer plants and tradescantia—but also more exotic growth. Huge staghorn ferns hung from the sprinkler pipe supports. Ficus and hibiscuses, oleanders and eucalypts grew from pots, and there were tables covered with weird aloes, and euphorbias and other fleshy, striped and waxy-flowered items that Marlene could not identify. A faint scent of jasmine floated over the bass note of the moist earth.
She saw a flash of a remarkable lavender color through the dense branches of a large croton and went around a potting table to see what it was. The plant was in a pot on the floor. It had dark green shiny leaves like a rhodie, but its flowers looked like giant purple pansies. She poked under its branches to see whether there was a label.
Behind her a voice said, “It’s Brunfelsia floribunda, from Brazil.”
Marlene jumped back six inches and whirled, startled. Maggie Dobbs was sitting on a low green wooden bench in an alcove made by a pair of potting tables.
“It’s lovely,” said Marlene, recovering her composure. “Do you, um, do all this?” she asked, gesturing to the conservatory.
“Yup. Me and Manuel the gardener. I have a green thump. Thumb.” She held up her hand with the thumb sticking out. The fingers, Marlene saw, were wrapped around a squat brown bottle. Maggie looked at the bottle as if she had just noticed its attachment to her hand. “Want a drink? It’s B and B.”
“Um, I think I had enough already tonight, thanks. As I’m sure you observed. I have to apologize… .”
“Nah! Life of the party. It was worth it to see the expression on that jerk Jim Royce’s face when you started talking about fucking corpses. Oops! Excuse my French!” She placed her hand over her mouth and giggled. Marlene wondered how long she had been hiding from her own party behind the potted plants. Apparently, and contradicting her previous thinking, the ability to give nice parties was not a perfect recipe for the good life.
“Mind if I join you?” Marlene asked.
“Sit,” said Maggie, and she took a swig from her bottle. There were two bars of hectic red across her cheeks and her blue eyes were bleary, but aside from this, she still looked neat and doll-like in her golden hostess costume. Marlene did not want to think about her own appearance; she thought she had removed all of the vomit from her hair. Some people are neat from the core out, she decided, of which happy company Marlene was not a member.
Marlene leaned back against the wall behind the bench, drew out her Marlboros, and lit one.
“Oooh! Ciggies! Thank God!”
“You want one?”
“God, yes! I’m quitting.”
On impulse, Marlene finger-palmed the cigarette and used a standard sleight-of-hand production, seeming to pluck it out of thin air with a snap of her fingers.
“Yikes!” cried Maggie. “Do that again!”
Grinning, Marlene hummed an upbeat version of “Tea for Two” and did a little routine of vanishes, acquitments, and productions using her own lit cigarette.
“That’s terrific!” Maggie screamed. “How did you learn to do that?”
“I had a lot of time to practice. A physical therapist I had after I got blown up thought it was a good way to strengthen my hands.” She held up her hand and wiggled the mutilated fingers.
“Blown up?” Maggie said, her eyes widening.
“Yeah, by a letter bomb.”
“Oh, God, she was blown up, she knows corpse fuckers, she does magic… .” She hung her head and her golden Dutch boy covered her face. “I’m so dull I could scream.”
“Well, I’m dull too, now, invisible, in fact, at least according to what’s-his-face—that Royce asshole. Wife-of-hood.”
“Yeah, he treats me like I was Twiggy, only not as socially valuable.”
“Well, at least you’re dull and rich,” said Marlene. “It beats being dull and poor.” It was a cruel thing to say, and Marlene immediately regretted saying it.
Maggie let out a wail. “I know! I’m so ashamed! I have everything and most people have nothing and I’m still miserable. And, of course, even saying that makes me feel even more ashamed. I have a marvelous husband and two marvelous children. There’s no end to it.” A fat tear plopped onto her cheek.
“Well, I’m miserable too,” said Marlene, thinking once again of the first conversation she had had that day with a cigarette-bumming woman on a bench, and what she had concluded from it, “but I’m damned if I’m going to be maudlin. Come on, fuck ’em all! We’ll join the … Wife-Of Self-Defense Association.”
Maggie gave her a long unfocused look. “Is there one?”
“I think we just formed it. You can be the first president.”
“No,” said Maggie instantly. “You be the first president. I have to be the secretary.”
That started them giggling. Marlene exclaimed, “I love it! It’s even got a good acronym. WOSDA.”
“Yeah,” said Maggie, “as in ‘Darling, WOSDA matter with you now?”
By the time Karp tracked Marlene down, an hour or so later, they were still laughing like banshees, clinging to each other on the green bench, the empty bottle stashed behind a potted oleander.
Bishop visited the house in Little Havana over the weekend. The thin man was watching golf on television when he strode in.
“Interested in a little work?” Bishop asked.
“No, I like sitting on my ass watching golf,” said the thin man sourly.
“Jerry James Depuy,” said Bishop, “may have become a tiny problem.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“Yeah, he’s dead. His works have apparently outlived him. Apparently some ex-cop was asking questions of the widow. It turns out this guy works for the House committee on contract. She told him that she’d given all his stuff to the AP and they’d given it to Georgetown U. for their Kennedy archive.”
“So? Aside from that bullshit with Ferrie, he didn’t know dick.”
“Yes, well, we always knew Ferrie was one of the weak links. Secrecy was not his strong suit. He liked to brag. The point is, it turns out that among the material passed on to the archive were several spools of eight-millimeter film.”
The thin man looked away from the TV for the first time. He stared straight into Bishop’s eyes. “I got that film, if that’s what you’re thinking. When Ferrie went down.”
“Yes, you did, the original reels. But film can be copied. It’s entirely possible that the little asshole showed the film to Depuy and Depuy copied it. I went to the archive myself the other day and found that the committee staff had already grabbed Depuy’s material.”
“But you don’t know that the film they have is Ferrie’s film.”
“No, I don’t,” Bishop agreed. “But the possibility is extremely disturbing. We’re going to be busy people if a copy survived. And if the people looking at it understand what it means.”