Falsely Accused Read Online Free Page A

subject.
    â€œSo. What do you think this is going to cost me?”
    Karp regarded him blankly. “Hmm? I don’t know, Murray. Don’t worry about it. We’ll win, you’ll make money.”
    â€œBut if we don’t win,” Selig persisted.
    Something hard congealed in Karp’s yellowish gaze. “Murray, I said, don’t worry about it. I’m taking the case.”
    â€œBut …”
    â€œMurray,” said Karp with finality. “I’ll pay you. ”

TWO
    Two women, one very tall, one of ordinary size, both dressed in silk kimonos, sat talking and drinking champagne on a bed in a loft on Crosby Street in lower Manhattan. They were wearing the gowns because they had been caught unprepared in a summer downpour and were being languorous before getting dressed again in dry clothes. The tall one was the freelance journalist whose peculiar name Naomi Selig had tried vainly to recall the previous evening, Ariadne Stupenagel. She was, to look at, quite as odd as her name. Over six feet tall and leggy, with broad mannish shoulders and wide womanly hips, Stupenagel had facial features in proportion. Her mouth was wide and lippy, her jaw strong, her nose generous. Her eyes, dark, knowing, heavily mascaraed and shadowed green-blue, looked as large as a pony’s. She wore her dust blond hair piled up on top of her head in the manner of Toulouse-Lautrec’s barmaids, which added another several inches to her height. If not beautiful in the conventional sense, she was hard to miss and memorable.
    Marlene Ciampi, her hostess, was, in contrast, beautiful in the conventional sense, looking, as an artist friend of hers had once noted, exactly like Bernini’s statue of St. Teresa in Ecstasy. St. Teresa was not, however, a smart kid from Queens with adorable black ringlets and a glass eye.
    The meeting was in the nature of a reunion. Stupenagel had just returned to New York from a year covering the guerilla war in Guatemala. The two women were at the point of drunkenness in which confidences may begin to flow, and everything seems vastly funny.
    â€œI can’t get over what you’ve done with the loft,” said Stupenagel, refilling her glass. “It must have cost a fortune.”
    â€œYes, it did,” agreed Marlene, gazing contentedly out the open door of the bedroom at her remarkable dwelling. She had lived in this place since the days in which it was illegal to do so. She had with her own hands ripped out the ruins of an old electroplating factory and installed simple plumbing, electricity, heating, and cabinetwork. Necessarily, this had been crude work; as a junior assistant D.A., she’d had little cash to spare on comforts, although the mere size of the space—a hundred feet by thirty-three—made up for a lot. Nevertheless, she had lived ten years in what was little more than a shabbily furnished nineteenth-century factory: rusty tin ceiling, the floor of splintery planks where it was not concrete slab, tepid radiators, a tiny, fetid toilet, raw drywall partitions instead of proper rooms.
    Now, however, she looked out on an expanse of satiny Swedish-finished oak flooring, glowing under the track lighting that hung from the smooth dropped ceiling. She had real rooms with doors and brass hardware. The creaky inconvenient sleeping loft was now a handsome bedroom, w/bath. The kitchen was right out of Architectural Digest, oak cabinets, a double stainless reefer, a Vulcan stove. Lucy, the Karps’ seven-year-old daughter, had a cozy, carpeted bedroom and a well-stocked playroom. The stingy gas radiators were gone, and the whole vast space was heated and cooled in season by a climate control center that had its own little lair in a corner of the loft.
    â€œLuckily,” continued Marlene, “we had a fortune. Last year Butch made about twice the combined total of what our two salaries were when we both worked for the D.A. It was like Monopoly money;