Something was going on in New Orleans in the late summer of 1963, even if Garrison got sidetracked about what it really was. If there was a plot at all, it was hatched there, because Oswald was there and active, and guilty or innocent, Oswald is involved. He's still the key to everything.'
Crane nodded distractedly. His mind seemed to have passed over to some other subject. 'Okay, do what you have to and let me know as soon as anything breaks. But, Butch? Don't spend any money.'
After his meeting with Crane, Karp walked over to Independence Avenue and spent money. He bought two hot dogs, an egg roll, and a root beer from one of the trucks that parked in the driveway in front of the Civil War Memorial. It was long past the tourist season, but the sun was out, and it had turned into the sort of fairly pleasant late-autumn day Washington sometimes gets. The trucks still came at noon, their immigrant drivers hoping that hungry people with slender means and no fear of stomach cancer would show up in sufficient numbers to pay for the daily rental.
As Karp was entering his building, a small man in a red stocking cap and a shopping bag darted out from the cover of one of the marble lamp supports and accosted him. Karp shied away and kept moving. The man followed him into the building, waving a ragged pack of Xeroxed sheets and raving his assassination theory. The security guard at the desk inside rose to intercept him.
'You're making a big mistake,' the man shouted. 'I have the evidence right here…'
Karp moved toward the elevator. Red Hat was a well-known figure around the building. He believed that Kennedy had not been assassinated at all, that only a double had been killed in Dallas, and that the former president was now living in Georgia. It was, oddly enough, not the least-plausible story Karp had heard while at this job; it did not, for example, involve beings from other planets.
He was at his desk, eating his egg roll, with his head down over a paper napkin placed on the desk to catch the falling debris, when Clay Fulton came in and sat down on a side chair.
'Is that good?' Fulton asked, curling his lip in distaste.
'It sucks.'
'How come you don't get none of these fancy lobbyist lunches I keep hearing about?'
'I don't know,' said Karp through egg roll, 'but it's a real disappointment. I mean, I'm a Washington lawyer, right? Maybe those guys you hear about with the big lunches are just bragging. Maybe they're really grabbing franks off the hot trucks.'
'Could be,' said Fulton, chuckling. 'I saw that movie V.T. got. That's some interesting movie.'
'Yeah. He pointed out Veroa? Good. Now you know what he looks like, you can go down there and get him.'
'I should get him? Why don't we just have Al Sangredo bring him up?'
'Because you're the official investigator and Al isn't, one, and two, I got something else I want Al to follow up on. I think it'd be a good idea if Al used his contacts to see exactly how this drug beef that Veroa's got hanging actually went down-how dirty is he, is it a legit beef-like that.'
Fulton chewed his mustache, ruminating. 'You think it might've been a setup?'
'I don't know, but I make it a point that when I talk to a guy I want information out of, I know where and how hard he can be squeezed.'
The detective rose and went toward the door. 'Okay. I'll get Bea to cut some travel.'
'No, you can't do that. No further expenditure. Apparently we're under investigation.'
Fulton stared at him in disbelief. 'We're being investigated? I thought we're the investigators.'
'Yeah, but they're on our ass for spending money that Congress hasn't appropriated-I forget what it's called, but it's a big deal. Put it on your card. Don't worry-you'll get it back.'
'I got to fly to Miami and pick up your Cuban on my own card?'
'You got it, chief. Consider it a little vacation. Take a few days. Play the ponies. Eat some stone crabs.'
'Yeah, right,' said Fulton sourly. 'And I'll work on my tan.'
Marlene and her daughter looked through dusty blinds out at the courtyard of Federal Gardens, watching a small woman being dragged across the dead grass by a big black dog. The woman was their neighbor, the one Marlene called the Dwarf. Mrs. Thug. She was not, of course, an actual dwarf, merely a small, thin woman, too small and light to control an athletic and untrained dog that was delirious with joy at this brief respite from its nearly perpetual confinement.
'That lady is yelling bad words at her dog, Mommy,' observed Lucy.
'Yeah, I hear,' said Marlene. The woman had tripped over a grass hummock and gone down and the dog was racing around her, capering and barking. The woman and the dog ran around in circles for a while until she managed to snag the dog's lead, after which she dragged it back into her apartment. The cute puppy had become an unmanageable adolescent. A common tale, and Marlene thought it was just as well that they hadn't tried the same script with a human child. A door slammed, and Dwarf strode across Marlene's field of view, with a purple car coat thrown over her aqua-colored supermarket checker's uniform. The dog had already started its endless whining. The dramatic high point of my day, thought Marlene, that and, I have to get out of the house.
The phone rang, and Lucy cried, 'I'll get it!'
Marlene followed her into the kitchen and poured herself another cup of coffee. It was probably Karp. In the wake of the Dobbs party, they had just concluded one of their bad weeks-silence, interspersed with coldly formal interactions. Karp was distracted, worried about something, probably to do with work. Marlene's share of the marital responsibility had always been to worm these worries out of him, but she no longer had the energy. Something vast and soggy hung between them, compounded of Marlene's isolation and feelings of uselessness, and the Big Secret, the Bloom thing. And sex. They had only done it once since Marlene had arrived in Washington, and remarkably-for the Karps had until then enjoyed a delicious and imaginative life of the flesh-it had fizzled. Karp had withdrawn into the despondency he exhibited when he didn't know what was going on in their relationship, favoring her on many occasions with the sort of long-suffering, whipped-Airedale looks that drove her batty. A dozen times she had opened her mouth to confront, to tell all, to break through into real life again, but each time she had lost courage.
This can't go on, she thought, and lit a cigarette from the butt of the one she was smoking-a bad sign-but what could stop it? She wasn't going to sink down into ultimate depression; the crazy scene at the Dobbses' showed that well enough. But was she going to keep on being naughtier and naughtier until something broke? She thought of Maggie Dobbs and the mad laughing in the greenhouse…
'It's a lady,' said Lucy. Marlene took the receiver, knowing that it was Maggie calling, ready to give her 'this is amazing, I was just thinking about you,' and was oddly shocked to hear instead the voice of Luisa Beckett.
After some stilted preliminaries, Beckett said, 'The reason I called, I thought you'd want to know. Morgan got sentenced on a 130.65, three counts. Max of fifteen.'
'Oh, honey, that's terrific!' cried Marlene. The 130.65 was first-degree sexual abuse, a Class D felony; the baby raper would be away for at least seven years, if he survived at all at the very bottom of the Attica pecking order.
'Yeah, well, I thought you'd like to know. It was your case.' Luisa's tone was dull and tired, and vaguely guilt-making.
'So. How're things?'
'Okay. You know, the usual.'
Marlene brought up some cases, as conversation, but Luisa did not seem to want to converse. Why the hell had the woman called anyway? What did she want, an apology for leaving them in the lurch? For fucking up? Marlene persisted mulishly, picking at the scab.
'What about that mobster, Buona-something? What happened with him?'
'Buonafacci. We're not handling that anymore. Your old buddy Guma's got it.'
'Guma? Why's he got it? It's a rape case.'
'Yeah, well he must've pulled some strings with narco or one of the real bureaus. They figure they can hold the rape over him, Buonafacci, and he'll help them out somehow. Don't ask me, I just work here.'
There didn't seem to be much to say after that. Marlene finished the call feeling, if possible, worse than she had before it. The dog was howling again. Marlene got Lucy dressed and threw on her own rags in a concentrated fury, scattering sparks and cigarette ashes over everything, leaving the breakfast dishes in the sink, which she herself considered the very lowest level of sluthood, and was just wheeling the stroller out when the phone rang again.
