'… 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.'
