Read Online Irresistible Impulse by Robert K. Tanenbaum - Free Book Online

need a friend,” said Karp. “Everyone hates me.”
    “With some justification, I might say. You’re really going to take on Rohbling?”
    “You heard already? What is it, on TV?”
    “No, Keegan was unloading to Zepelli and some of the other bureau chiefs about your loose cannon-hood, and Z. mentioned it to me at a Fraud Bureau staff meeting.”
    “He was really pissed, was he?”
    “Mmm, not as such. I gathered he was irritated but ruefully admiring of your chospeh.”
    “ Chutzpah , V.T. You have to try to generate more phlegm with the Yiddishisms: chhhhhutz-pah .”
    “I’ll try, but as you know, my people are phlegm-impaired.”
    “True. Look, why I called, let’s have lunch, soon.”
    They made a date for the following day. Unlikely as it might appear from their respective backgrounds, V.T. Newbury was one of Karp’s best friends and probably the smartest person Karp knew. Just now he badly needed both friendship and smarts.
    A knock on the door and Connie Trask came in pushing one of the wire-basket carts used to transport case files around the halls. It was stacked with red cardboard folders, one for each of the murders for which Jonathan Rohbling stood accused, plus additional files Roland had assembled since the arrest.
    “That was fast,” said Karp.
    “Yeah, he seemed upset,” said the secretary. “He said he peed on them. You might want to check that out before you take them home. Oh, Lieutenant Fulton called. I told him you were in there with Roland giving him bad news. He laughed and said you could call him back.”
    “Thanks, Connie,” said Karp, reaching for the phone.
    Lucy Karp sat in spelling, morosely waiting for her turn to come around again. Resemble had been her word last time. Briefly, it had flashed through her mind to say, when using it in a sentence, “Mrs. Lawrence’s face resembles a snotty kleenex,” but had chickened out. Spelling was not a problem. Math was the problem. Math and Mrs. Lawrence, what she did in math class.
    At the next desk, Robert Liu stood up and misspelled surrender , and sat down blushing. Lucy stood and spelled it right and said, “The general promised he would never surrender,” looking Mrs. Lawrence in the eye as she did so. The teacher gave her that phony smile and called on the next kid, and Lucy knew she was plotting her revenge when math class came along.
    As it would, inevitably. There would be a recess at ten-thirty. They would stream out to the schoolyard, and Lucy’s friends would set up the long ropes to dance double Dutch, chanting, and Lucy would leap among the strands, best of all of them, having learned to jump rope from her mother so far in the past that she could barely remember acquiring the skill. But then they would have to return to the orange-peel-smelling, hot-paint-smelling school building and have math, and Mrs. Lawrence would return the homework, Lucy’s marked with shameful red crosses, which she folded quickly and hid away in her backpack. None of her friends, not Janet Chen, or Franny Lee, or Martha Kan, who could barely speak English, had the slightest problem with long division, with problems that made Lucy’s brain freeze up and sweat start from her forehead. Then after the passing out of the homework, Mrs. Lawrence would chalk four problems up on the board, and of course she would pick Lucy for the hardest one, and Lucy would march up to the board, her face blazing, her stomach roiling, with three other kids, and the others would all do their problems right away and sit down, and Lucy would be up there trying to remember seven into sixty-four and what over, and the whole class would be silent, waiting, and then Mrs. Lawrence would say sweetly, “Lucy needs some help,” and then she would talk Lucy through the whole problem as if she were a tiny little moron, with many a sarcastic aside about “somebody didn’t pay attention when we were learning how to carry the number into the next column,” and the sweat