The same morning that Felix Tighe walked out of the Queens County Courthouse, a very tall man and a woman of moderate size walked into the New York County Court House, at 100 Centre Street on the Island of Manhattan. They walked hand in hand until they reached the main doorway, at which point the woman pulled away. From this you could tell that they were not going into the courthouse to be married; if they had been, the woman would have held on tighter. In fact, both of them worked in the courthouse, as assistant district attorneys. Although they were not going to be married today, they were more or less in love, and had been for nearly four years.
The very tall man—he stood just over six-five—was obviously a familiar figure in these halls. A number of people called out greetings as the two of them moved through the lobby crowd. He acknowledged these with a nod or a grin or a wisecrack. The man had an aggressive walk, a City walk: head forward and casting from side to side like a rifleman on point, shoulders slightly hunched. You had to look closely to see that his left leg was a little lame. The hands were big in proportion, the wrists thick and strong.
He had an aggressive face too—a heavy, broad brow, a big bony jaw, a long nose that had been broken and then straightened out, leaving a bump just north of center. The lines and other accessories were what you might expect from thirty-four years of this life, lived mostly in the City.
Except for the eyes, it was an ordinary face, in New York at least, although it might have drawn a second glance in Marietta, Georgia. The eyes were long, narrow, slightly slanted, gray with yellow lights: wolf eyes, perhaps a souvenir of a Cossack raid on some eastern shtetl. It was not a peaceful face.
The man was Roger Karp, Butch to his friends, who were few, but good ones. He was at this time Chief of the Criminal Courts Bureau of the New York District Attorney’s office. The woman was Marlene Ciampi, an assistant district attorney, his employee and intermittent main squeeze.
It was Marlene’s fantasy that their affair was a private matter, and one that, if public, would expose her to disdain—the bimbo who screws the boss. The fact that the newest secretary was filled in on the details of her involvement with Karp soon after being shown where they kept the typewriter ribbons did not matter to Marlene. If she did not acknowledge it publicly, it did not really exist. Karp had been irritated by this obsession at first, but now regarded it with something like fond amusement, another of his sweetie’s infinite skein of eccentricities.
Over one side of the marble entranceway to this building were inscribed the words, “Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the People?” As they passed through the security checks and entered the swirl of the main lobby, they received, as every morning, the answer why not. This area of 100 Centre Street is to the City’s justice what the pit of the stock exchange is to its finance—a confused interzone full of worried, nervous people making deals—with the difference that the ethnic mix of the participants is spicier and the deals are about time, not money.
Even at this early hour, the lobby was crowded with people: the law’s servants—bored cops expecting hours of tedium sitting on hard benches, scurrying clerks and messengers, technical experts with bulging briefcases, lawyers in sharp suits, smiling hard, public defenders gearing up for another day of saving ingrates—and its more numerous subjects—the criminals, their victims, witnesses, and their families and attendants.
Besides these, the lobby also included a population that had, since the repeal of the vagrancy laws and the closing of the mental hospitals, used the courthouse as its dayroom, having nowhere else to go. And why not? It was dry, warm in winter, cool in summer; it had water and bathrooms in reasonable repair; and it was safe. No one got mugged in the Courthouse, except after due process of law. If you were homeless, the courthouse was shelter; if you couldn’t afford the movies or TV, here was a never-ending source of entertainment.
The scene that greeted Karp and Marlene this, and every, working morning was like a throwback to an earlier period in the evolution of justice, when the king laid down the law in the course of a royal progress through his domains, surrounded by nobles, clergy, and retainers in a kind of moving fair, attended also by mountebanks, jugglers, clowns, humble petitioners, cutpurses, rogues, freaks and the kind of miscellaneous idlers attracted to any show.
In the marble halls, whole families clustered in corners, eating spicy food out of paper bags. Ragged children played on and under the worn wooden benches and lumbering men made of dank clothes, hair and grease shouted at each other or at no one, until the tired security forces tossed them out. But they came back. This area was known to every denizen of the courthouse as the Streets of Calcutta.
Marlene checked her wristwatch. “Court in ten. I got to go prep. So long,” she said, giving him the favor of a smile. She had a beautiful smile still, in a face that was not quite beautiful any longer. Stunning, rather. Arresting. Marlene Ciampi had started out with a face from a fashion magazine—flawless bisque skin, long, tilted black eyes, a wide, luscious mouth, million-dollar cheekbones, and the usual accessories—had lost it all when a bomb went off in her face four years ago, and then got a lot of it back through the most advanced and expensive surgery a hugely successful lawsuit could buy.
The disaster had burned out her left eye and everything extra from her face and body. She had become tough, wiry, and graceful with contained energy, like a flyweight boxer or a jaguar. She wore a glass eye at work and a pirate patch off duty. Either way Karp still thought she was a being marvelous and heartbreaking at the same time. She made him suffer, also—an added attraction.
“Aren’t you going to give me a big hug and a kiss good-bye?” asked Karp. “God knows when I’ll see you again.”
Her smile twisted into a wry grimace. “It could be tonight, if you play your cards right, and no, I’m not, not in the middle of the Streets of Calcutta as you know, so stop asking.”
Karp tugged gently at the sleeve of her raincoat. “I’ll never stop,” he said. She rolled her eyes to heaven and began to pull away again, when another hand landed on her sleeve.
This belonged to a small, bald, sweaty man wearing a three-piece dark suit, with dandruff, thick glasses, and a pervasive cologne. This was one of the fraternity of petty lawyers who derived their living from representing defendants prosperous enough to pay cash for their day in court.
“Ah, Miss Ciampi, am I glad to see you!” the man said breathlessly. Marlene stared at where he had grabbed her sleeve until his hand fluttered away. “Why is that, Mr. Velden?” she asked coolly.
“Oh, I just thought we could save some time, come to some workable agreement on De Carlo.”
“Save some time? You’ve decided to plead your client guilty to felony assault and robbery?”
Velden smiled and held up his hands in protest. “Please, lady, be serious. Larceny I’ll give on, but don’t bust my hump with the felony assault. It’s a ten-dollar purse snatch and the kid’s never been convicted.”
“Yeah, this’ll be a first. Also, counselor, my witness informs me she received a phone call the other night suggesting that she’d get worse than a bang on the head if she testified. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
A look of pained innocence appeared on Velden’s face. “What are you implying? Me? Arthur Velden? Threatening witnesses?”
“Have a chat with your client, Mr. Velden. Explain the rules. See you in court.”
She turned and elbowed her way into the crowd.
Velden chuckled as he watched her go. “What a little pisser, heh?” he remarked to Karp. “She’ll learn.”
“I doubt that, Arthur,” said Karp, walking away. “She’s a slow learner. And I wouldn’t play games with her, if I were you. She’s not one of the boys.”
Karp rode up on the elevator to his office on the ninth floor, and walked into the Bureau offices, a large room about the size of a squash court and about as elegant. Karp was not in favor with the administrative powers of the district attorney’s office, a fact reflected in his office furniture, much of which ran to green and gray steel and sprung vinyl in reptilian colors.
The Bureau secretary, a middle-aged, tough-minded black woman named Connie Trask, greeted him as he entered.
“I’m glad you’re here,” said Trask. “His Excellency has been on the phone twice.”
“Don’t tell me—his mother’s coming over and he wants to borrow my law-school diploma.”
She giggled. “You’re late on the budget.”
“Yeah. That’s what he wants to talk about, right?”
“I guess. He don’t talk to me, sugar. Should I put it through?”
Karp nodded glumly and Connie dialed the D.A.’s number. He went into his private office and sat down in a squeaky wooden chair purchased new during the senior Roosevelt administration. He picked up his phone. After the obligatory two-minute wait on hold, the District Attorney came on the line. There followed a minute or two of the inane and insincere small talk without which politicians cannot conduct the most trivial business, delivered in Sanford Bloom’s marvelously deep and mellow voice, beloved of the networks, but fingernails on the blackboard to Karp.
“Ah, Butch, it’s the fifteenth. I don’t have your draft budget submittal.”
“I’m working on it. I just got off a trial yesterday.”
This reference to trials was calculated to annoy. Bloom was not, and never had been a trial lawyer, unlike Bloom’s predecessor, the illustrious, almost legendary, Francis P. Garrahy, deceased. After a brief, pointed silence, Bloom ignored the remark and went on. “Yes. Remember I want you to include resources for community relations and affirmative action.”
That meant, Karp thought, lawyers sitting in meetings and writing plans instead of trying cases, so that Bloom could flash a few meaningless sheets of paper at other meetings. He uttered a few noncommittal phrases in the flat voice he always used with Bloom and the conversation trickled to an end. As usual, after any conversation with his boss, Karp felt hollow and vaguely ill. The previous year Karp had caught Bloom in a piece of nasty malfeasance, since which time Bloom had stayed out of Karp’s way on big issues, allowing him to run his bureau as an independent fief.
On the surface. Beneath lay a rich vein of deathless hatred, hatching pitfalls, traps, petty harassments. Karp looked at the budget sheets on his desk with distaste. He was at least ten lawyers short of where he should be, but he was extremely reluctant to ask for new people. Any transfers into Karp’s bureau were liable to be either spies, or more probably, turkeys that Bloom had hired to do a favor for someone and who were too dreadful even for Bloom’s cronies in the other bureaus to stomach. It would be a double score for Bloom if he could stick a couple of losers in Karp’s shop.
Karp never asked directly for new troops. Instead, he overworked the small team of decent lawyers he had gathered around him over the years, and himself worst of all, and occasionally allowed disgruntled people from other parts of the D.A.’s office to get some serious trial experience under his direction.
There were few other places for them to get it under the Bloom regime. Garrahy had been a trial lawyer, and Karp was a trial lawyer in the old man’s image, he hoped. Bloom was not a trial lawyer. He was a bureaucrat and a politician, and good at it, too. He could weasel and delay and obfuscate like a sonofabitch, and trade favors and get elected.
But not try cases. If you went to trial a lot, unless you were prepared, and understood the law, and made sure that the cops didn’t screw around with the evidence, you might lose, and let some bad guy get loose, and what was worse, get loose publicly. It was much safer to bargain, and do the people’s business in whispers beneath the bench, and if some monster got out on the street in eighteen months, well, that surely was the business of the courts, or the prisons, or the parole board, and couldn’t be blamed on the D.A.
Karp didn’t think about this stuff anymore. He did as many trials as he could and he made sure his people understood that the trial was the foundation of the whole system. That this was peculiar, even bizarre, that this was like the Air Force having to belabor to its pilots the importance of airplanes, was a fact that no longer occupied the center of Karp’s thoughts. It just made him tired. With a sigh, he switched off Bloom and turned to the endless and unsympathetic columns of figures.
Felix Tighe slept nearly eight straight hours at his mother’s house, in his old bed in the room he had occupied as a boy. His mom kept it just the way he had left it—the weight set, the Jim Morrison poster, even his high school books still lined up neatly on a shelf. He awoke around five in the afternoon, feeling peaceful and secure, and after limbering up, performed three repetitions of the Ten-no kata of the shotokan school of karate. Felix had recently been awarded a shodan, the first degree black belt in this school, one of the few projects he had ever completed, and an accomplishment of which he was inordinately proud.
Sweating slightly now, he stripped, showered, and dressed in the clothes his mother had laid out: tan whipcord pants, a green plaid sportshirt, a gray cashmere sweater, gray socks, and shiny penny loafers. His mother always seemed to have a supply of clothes in Felix’s size; a good thing too, since he had thrown away the clothes he had been wearing the night of his arrest.
His mother was in the kitchen cutting up potatoes on a butcher’s chopping block. She looked up and her face brightened when he came in. “My, don’t you look nice. Does that shirt fit?” She put her knife down, walked over to him and adjusted his collar. Felix hugged her and kissed her loudly on the cheek. “How’s my best girl?” he said. She giggled and kissed him back, and smoothed her hair when he released her. She was a small woman of about fifty, with the same dark handsomeness as Felix. Her hair was thick and dark, showing no gray, swept back in a large bun at the nape of her neck. She was wearing a cotton shirtwaist dress in some neutral color and a white apron around her waist.
“You’re still the prettiest mom in the world,” said Felix, going over to the refrigerator. He poked around and pulled out a can of Schlitz and a bag of Fritos.
His mother said, “You’ll ruin your appetite. I’m making fried chicken and french fries.”
“Ma, I got to go back to Queens tonight. I thought I told you.”
“Felix, it’s your favorite! And it’s all prepared—”
“I’m sorry as hell, Ma, but it’s business. They’ve got me writing this big report, and it’s got to be at the front office day after tomorrow. I thought I could finish it last night, but those crazy cops locked me up. I can’t tell the boss I was in jail, can I? I mean they wouldn’t understand and all …”
Her face softened. “Well then, if it’s business. Oh, but I do wish you’d take it easier. I want you to be a success, dear, but you should relax more.”
“Yeah, well I’ll try, Ma. But you know how it is, the executive rat race.” He shrugged and showed a wry smile.
“Yes, I do, and I don’t forget what it did to your poor father.”
“And how’s your business, Ma?” said Felix quickly. He disliked talking about his father. “Doing good?”
“Oh, fair. It’s a lot of work, and I do it all. You can’t get help today. Doesn’t matter what the pay is, they’d rather go on welfare. And your brother … if you’re not watching him every minute, he makes a mess of everything.” She came toward him and touched his cheek. “Now if I had you here, it’d be different.”
“Yeah I know, Ma. We talked about that a million times. I appreciate it, but I got to follow my talent. My own star, like you used to tell me. I got lots of deals now, one of them has got to pay off. I’m real close, I know it.” He grinned sheepishly. “Speaking of which, I’m a little short this week. And they cleaned out my wallet in jail.”
“They did? Did you report it?”
“Sure, but don’t count on anything happening there. The cops are just as bad as the crooks. They probably take a cut.”
“You poor thing! I’ll write you a check.”
“Thanks a million, Ma,” said Felix warmly. “Hey, you know, I’ve been thinking about moving to Manhattan. It’s closer to work and, you know, I’d get to see you more.”
“Felix, that’s wonderful! Have you found a place?”
“Not yet. But rent is sky high in the good neighborhoods. And they want first and last month security, and sometimes you got to tip the super to get you in.”
Felix’s mother went to a drawer in one of the kitchen cabinets and took out her checkbook. “I know,” she said. “Soon decent people won’t be able to afford the city at all. Will five hundred do it?”
“That’ll be great, Ma. But, uh, if you could, I could use a couple hundred in cash.”
She looked at him, and something odd seemed to come over her face, as if there was another person sitting behind her eyes. “That’s fine,” she said pleasantly. “I have some stuff I need to drop off in the safe deposit. You can take that along when you get your cash.”
At about four-thirty that afternoon, Karp left his office and began the daily inspection of his empire. This was comprised of his own Bureau Chief’s office, a secretarial bullpen, two large partitioned bays where the rank and file worked, and a set of tiny colonies—little offices, alcoves, and closets that the Criminal Courts Bureau had accumulated in various deals and trade-offs over the years, every square inch of which was sacred soil to be defended to the last memo.
People called out to him or waved good-naturedly as he threaded his way through the warren of neck-high glass and steel barricades that choked the work space. Karp liked this part of his day. Although he accepted that his temper and impatience made him an indifferent bureaucrat, he liked to think that he was a good manager. Managing was like coaching a team, he thought: You develop your players, you teach them how to work together, give them some tricks, and send them out to win.
In fact, the Criminal Courts Bureau was and had always been a jocky sort of place. Most of the young attorneys who came to work as prosecutors had played some ball in school. The squad bays were busy with energetic young men, their hair cut unfashionably short, making loud wisecracks. Nobody ever just threw a piece of yellow legal paper into the can; it was always a graceful hook or jumper and an exhalation of “Yessss!” or “Two points!”
In general, Karp was pleased with the quality of the kids who came to work for him; what was wrong was what became of them after a zillion cases and no trials. It was like training a team to a high pitch and never letting them play. It wore them out and made them dull and cynical before their time.
He walked into the cubicle occupied by Tony Harris. Stacks of large-format computer paper, books, brown accordion folders, and sheaves of various sorts of paper covered the small metal desk and flowed down over the straight wooden visitor’s chair to the floor. More paper, some of it in dusty cartons, was stacked precariously against two walls. It looked less like an office than something geological, a cave or the results of a retreating glacier. Harris had made the mistake of admitting that he knew something about computers and had been tagged with piles of administrative work on top of his court schedule. Harris was a skinny young man with bright blue eyes and a bush of brown hair that sprouted like marsh grass from either side of his face and down his collar. A scraggly mustache floated over a wide mouth, which, when he saw Karp, expanded into a wide crooked-toothed grin.
“What are you so happy about?” asked Karp.
“I think we stole about ten more trial slots than we’re entitled to this week—all homicides, by the way. Our clearance rate is piss-poor, but, ah, I made some adjustments on the computer. Of course, if the chief administrative judge or the D.A. ever find out about it, I’ll probably get disbarred or something.”
Karp chuckled. “Don’t worry, kid, they’ll never catch us. His Honor the chief administrative judge has other fish to fry, like running for the Court of Appeals, God help us. He’s not going to make any waves. As long as the numbers balance he’ll never notice we jacked up the intake figures. Same thing with Bloom. Wharton might catch on, but I can handle him. Worse comes to worst, they’ll charge us with falsifying records. We’ll plead insanity and walk. But the main thing is …”
“Yeah, trials. More trials.”
“That’s right. Keep the mutts honest. The only way. Incidentally, how many homicides do we have this year so far?”
Harris shuffled through some papers and pulled out a chart.
“Six-hundred twenty-one. Up seven from this time last year.”
“Great. We must be doing something right,” Karp said. “I’ll tell that to Mr. District Attorney next time he wants to clean out the whores from Times Square or some other goddamn project. Hey, have you see Freddie Kirsch around recently?”
“Yeah, I think he’s in his cell. I heard suspenders snapping. Speaking of cells, there any chance of me getting a bigger place? You got me doing all this administrative and computer crap, and I got green stripers coming up around my ears. There’s no place to fucking sit down.”
Harris gestured toward his cubicle, which was about the size and shape of an apartment bathroom or a walk-in closet.
Karp spread his hands in helplessness. “Tony, I got nothing to offer. And I need you to handle the admin because nobody else I got knows how to fuck with the data.” He looked sad. “This was a great place to work in forty years ago when the crime rate was about ten per cent what it is now. You know, this bay we’re in now was a reception area, back when the D.A. had about thirty attorneys in all. Joe Lerner told me when I started here. Can you believe it? A reception area?”
“A long time ago,” agreed Harris. “Still,” he added, taking in his office with a sour glance, “it’s a definite statement by the people of New York. You’re garbage. Every day in every way you’re getting worser and worser.”
“Come on, Tony, what’s an office? You’re getting a great legal education. Couple of years, keep your nose clean, you’ll be defending pimps and making a fortune and this’ll all seem like a bad dream.”
Harris laughed and Karp walked off toward the cubicle of Freddy Kirsch, his mood darkening. Harris was one of the best, a decent funny kid with terrific courtroom instincts, but Karp could read the signs of wear and tear that meant he was not going to last. In general, Karp had found, only three kinds of lawyers stuck with the D.A.’s office in these corrupt times—one, slobs: those who had no other option, who, however talented legally, were too sloppy for a white-shoe firm and too disorganized to set up a practice, like Ray Guma; two, hobbyists, who had private income, and got a kick out of being hard-asses, like Roland Hrcany; and, finally, fanatics. Karp himself was a fanatic. Freddy Kirsch was another hobbyist. Harris was neither.
Karp found Kirsch at his desk, reading a tabloid. On the front page was a picture of a couple of cops standing next to a dumpster in an alley looking glumly at a small bundle at their feet. The headline read “GRAB MOM IN GARBAGE BAG KILLING.” Karp tapped his knuckles on the glass and the young lawyer looked up and grinned. He had hired Kirsch nearly a year ago on the recommendation of one of his law school professors. Kirsch was a Californian, a Berkeley graduate, smart and rich, hence a good prospect. Also he was tan, he had razor cut dark hair, he wore sharp, tailored dark suits, all of which endeared him to Karp, who was always having to lecture the scruffy polyestered St. John’s graduates who made up much of his staff on the importance of appearances in the legal game.
“What’s going on, boss?” asked Kirsch genially, leaning back in his swivel chair and hooking his thumbs behind his canary yellow suspenders. Karp perched on the edge of the desk, which was suspiciously clean. “Not much, Freddie. I thought I’d drop by and check out the Stahlmann trial. How’s it look?”
Kirsch kept his grin. “Looks like we won’t need a trial. He’s going to plead.”
“What? To murder two?”
“No, man one. I just talked to his lawyer this morning. We’ll go with it in Part 34 tomorrow.”
“Wait a second, Freddie. How come we’re accepting manslaughter as a plea on this one? This is the trunk murder, right? The guy bashed in the girlfriend’s head with a tire iron and stashed her in the trunk of her car.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Stahlmann’s a religious nut with a thing about pure women. He thought he’d found the last virgin in New York until some guy in his church told him one of his buddies had porked her a couple of years back. He went batshit.”
“So? What has that got to do with it? On a man one he could be walking in two years, out looking for more virgins.”
Kirsch’s smooth brow furrowed. “Extreme emotional disturbance is what. They’re arguing he lost his marbles from disappointment. They got a psychiatric examination confirms it.” He shrugged. “It’s an affirmative defense under the law. I figured it cast enough reasonable doubt on the case so that trial wasn’t worth it. So I took the man one. I’ll try to push for years on the sentencing.”
“Shit, Freddie!” Karp propelled himself violently off the desk and slammed his hand down on his thigh, making a sound like a gunshot. Kirsch jerked and sat up.
“What’re you talking ‘reasonable doubt’?” asked Karp contemptuously. “It’s an affirmative defense. The burden’s on them to show extreme emotional. They’ve got to have a preponderance of evidence. Do they? They’ve got crap. The guy laid for the girl in her apartment, wasted her, and hid the body. That doesn’t sound like he was out of his mind to me.”
“But they got a shrink—”
“Fuck the shrink, Freddie! The trier of fact can reject testimony as to extreme emotional disturbance, even if the prosecution presents no testimony to rebut. People v. Shelton. Come on, Freddie. You know this stuff.”
Kirsch looked so genuinely miserable that Karp’s ire receded. He perched again on the desk. “Look, Freddie, I’m sorry I have to be a hard-ass with you, but there’s no way around it. You want to be a trial lawyer, you got to worship perfection. That’s the goal. You can’t tell what a jury will do, maybe you’ll lose, but you have the obligation to walk in there with a perfect case, which includes knowing the relevant law.”
Freddie bit his lip and stared at his desk. “Yeah, I guess I fucked it up royally.”
“Come on, kid, you got a basically good case. Just call them up and tell them you reconsidered.”
“I can do that?”
“Shit, yes. It ain’t over ’til it’s over. Tell them you were suffering from extreme emotional disturbance.”
Kirsch laughed and the flush left his face. “OK, will do, boss. Say, speaking of emotional disturbance, you seen this yet?” He tapped his finger on the front page of the tabloid, which splashed the news of a murdered child found in a trash bag.
“Yeah, they picked up the mother. Who’s handling it?”
“Ciampi.”
“She is, huh? I better go over and talk to her about it. Let me know when you fix that Stahlmann thing.”
“Yeah, Christ, these homicides take a lot of time don’t they? How come they don’t have a separate bunch of people that just does homicides? I mean, we spend most of our time just running people through the Criminal Courts on petty shit, and then one of these comes along and it throws everything off kilter. Breaks the rhythm.” Freddie moved his shoulders rhythmically, to illustrate this perception.
Karp sighed and said, “Well, you got a point there, Fred, but as it happens there did used to be a homicide bureau.”
“Yeah? What happened to it?”
“Our D.A. shitcanned it the first year he was here.”
“No kidding! How come?”
“The homicide guys were all trial lawyers. Bloom doesn’t have much use for trial lawyers, and they didn’t have much use for him. Also, everything runs on clearances now—a murder’s just another case, nothing special about it, and so if you’re going to plea bargain away everything anyway, why bother having a bureau that specializes in prosecuting and trying murder cases? So he broke it up, and now most homicides come here, to Criminal Courts.”
“Uh-huh, I always wonder about that, why they didn’t go over to felony bureau.”
“Oh, that. That’s because of me.”
“Yeah? What do you mean, because of you?”
“Well, I guess I’m the closest thing the office has to a homicide expert now, so that’s one reason; and the other reason is, sometimes homicides get a lot of publicity and if I were to lose or otherwise screw up a big important case, then Bloom would have the excuse he needs to get rid of me. I think that’s the real reason.”
“So how come you’re still here?”
“Because I haven’t blown one yet.”
“You won all your cases?”
“Yeah. So far so good.”
“Holy shit! How do you do that?”
“By being perfect, Freddie,” said Karp with a tight smile.
“And how do you achieve this perfection?” Kirsch asked. Karp shot him a look, suspecting Freddie’s usual light sarcasm, but for once Kirsch appeared to be in the throes of a genuine admiration. Winning, Karp thought, the unimpeachable argument.
“Like I said, know the law. Know the witnesses. You have to have a mental picture of every one of your witnesses. You have to know what they’ll answer in your direct case, where they’re vulnerable on cross, and how you’re going to compensate for however they screwed up when you get them again on redirect.”
Kirsch looked dismayed. “I got to do this on what—thirty to fifty cases?”
“Yeah, you do, and not only that—you have to orchestrate the presentation of each witness so the whole show has the maximum impact on a jury. Like for instance, you have two eyewitnesses. One of them remembers a lot of detail—the day, the car, what the defendant was doing before, after—he’s a whole newsreel. The other guy just remembers the mutt had a red jacket and scar. Who you going to put on first?”
Freddie looked blank. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters! Everything matters! You put the guy with the details last. If you put him first the defense will question the lightweight on the very same details, and he won’t remember and that’ll leave the jury thinking maybe the first guy was making it up.
“Then there’s the evidence. You have to keep straight what documentary or physical evidence you’re going to present along with each witness and work that into the orchestration. And the Q. and A.’s: They have to be perfect too. Hammer them with the evidence. Make sure they identify the knife or the gun in detail, the bloodstains, whatever….”
“On every witness?”
“Not on every witness, Freddie. You don’t take Q. and A. on your witnesses. The less the defense knows about what your witnesses saw and did the better. You do it on witnesses friendly to the defense or on hostile witnesses. And on the ones you know are going to flip.”
“Shit, Butch! How the hell do you know which ones are going to flip?” asked Kirsch plaintively, suddenly aware that he was not to be supplied with a secret substitute for work or a simple trick.
“How do you know? It’s part of being perfect, Freddie,” said Karp casually, on his way out of the cubicle, “just like you’re going to be from now on.”
As Karp made his way through the maze of tiny passages, he was reflecting simultaneously on two related subjects. The first was that in the old days, somebody like Freddy would not have lasted two weeks in the homicide bureau. He would not have even gotten in, but if he had he would have been shredded and flushed after a single confrontation with the rock-hard men who had, under Francis Garrahy’s direction, made the New York City Homicide Bureau one of the finest prosecutorial organizations in the world.
The fact was, Freddie was bone lazy, but his intelligence made him worth a salvage effort. Also, he might stay a while. To such expedients had Karp been reduced. Ring in the Age of Brass!
The other subject was Marlene, and the unwelcome news that she had picked up the trash-bag child murder. Karp headed toward her office, which lay at the extreme end of a sixth-floor hallway leading to a pair of fire stairs. The architects had left a tiny alcove in the hallway beyond the stair doors and this alcove had been walled off and given a cheap door. There was just enough room for a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, and Marlene.
Karp knocked and, receiving no answer, entered. A bomb had once gone off in this office, but that was four years back, and the place looked to Karp as if it hadn’t been straightened since. He moved a stack of files off a chair and sat down to wait among the drifted papers. Sitting alone in Marlene’s office was an unnerving experience. Since the office was only seven feet wide and the hallway ceilings were almost fourteen feet high, it was like being at the bottom of a mailbox, an impression that the great rafts of paper scattered around did nothing to dispel.
He studied the dusty cream ceiling moldings. After a while, heels clicked on the marble floor outside. The door opened and Marlene came in, looking smudged and rumpled. She flung her handbag and a brown accordion folder down on her desk and flopped into the other chair. Kicking off her shoes, she put her feet up on her desk and lit a Marlboro.
“Rough day?” asked Karp.
“Rough? I wouldn’t say that. The usual. I got a new case today, another murdered child needless to say.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard. The trash-bag thing. Why ‘needless to say’?”
“Oh, because for some reason, whenever anybody decides to take the clippers, or the red-hot coat hanger, or the baseball bat, or the lit cigarette or the boiling grease to some little kid, which in this city is about forty-three times a day, whenever some asshole decides to do anything like that, in the rare instance where the case attracts the attention of the fucking law, then for some strange reason I get the case. Even though, my dear boss, I have mentioned this to you from time to time, that I cannot stand any more to—”
“Marlene, you know that’s not true. All the cases get assigned off a rotation schedule from the complaint room.”
”—stand any more to see little. Punctured. Bodies. Or talk to their mommies and daddies. And, as long as we’re being technical about it, do you know how many child homicide, child rape, and child felony assault cases I have had in the past year? You do not? Let me tell you. One hundred and fourteen. This is coincidence? The luck of the draw? Can you recall the last time Ray Guma, let’s say, had a case like that? Or Roland? Or any of the male attorneys? I’ll tell you, Cindy Pitowski has got ’em, and so does Ruth Kammer, and that’s all the ladies you got working for you right now.
“So I put it to you, counselor, on the preponderance of the evidence, is somebody saying, ‘who wants to fuck with this messy doo-doo, there’s no challenge, it’s a piece of shit, open and shut, smoking gun, it’s not roughie-toughie armed robbery, assault with a deadly, drug-crazed shoot-out, so let’s give to the cunts!’”
She stared at him so intensely that he dropped his gaze. At moments like these it appeared that she was flashing emotions from both of her black eyes, even though Karp knew that the left one was glass. Marlene lunged furiously toward her bag for another cigarette, and the motion caused a minor landslide of paperwork off her desk.
“You ought to get some of this cleared up,” Karp ventured, knowing instantly that it had been exactly the wrong thing to say. He saw her face grow tight and her lovely soft mouth knot into a ridged pale line. “Oh,” she said carefully, “is this what I owe the honor of your visit to? The inspector general is making his rounds. I’m sorry my desk isn’t all neatsy, sir, but I’ve been over to Bellevue, to the morgue, to see the child, a little girl named Lucy Segura. What her loving mother did to her body wasn’t too bad. She just cut off one of her fingers and shoved something into her little twat, and then strangled her. It wasn’t as bad as the one where they baked the little girl in the oven. You remember that one? I do.
“So I didn’t have time to clean up! I better do it now or the big man will be mad at me.” She sprang to her feet and began to sweep the piled papers off her desk with broad, violent movements of her hands and arms.
“Marlene! Stop!” shouted Karp. He rose from his seat and grabbed her around the shoulders. This was the only thing that really frightened Karp. Like most naturally brave men, he had little imagination, which doth make cowards of us all, and physical pain held no terrors for him, but when the black screamers took charge of Marlene it turned his bones to jelly.
She struggled and turned a stranger’s face up to him. “I can’t stand it,” she said, her jaw rigid. “I can’t can’t can’t can’t can’t! It’s too much. All the little children….”
Wisely, Karp kept his mouth shut for once, didn’t give a pep talk or useful advice, just held Marlene, who began to cry. After a while her sobs subsided into loud snuffles and her body relaxed against his.
“Whew, God! Sorry. Where’s the Kleenex?”
“Use my tie.”
She giggled. “No, I got them here.” She broke away and rummaged through her huge bag until she extracted a wad of tissue the size of a cabbage. She blew lustily into it. Then she sat on the edge of her desk and lit a cigarette.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “Things are getting hairy again. I used to wait for the dullness to set in, to where I get tough and cynical down deep inside. I don’t mean the pose. I got a pose as good as anybody’s. I mean deep, so you’re really dead. And I guess I can’t do that, I don’t want that to happen. I’m fighting it.”
“Not everybody’s dead,” said Karp defensively. “I’m not.”
She looked at him narrow-eyed through her smoke. “No you’re not, that’s true,” she said at length. “But you are also a lunatic, in your own sweet way.” She shook herself and started rooting around in the drift of papers. “Well, the performance is over for this afternoon, folks,” she said with a tight smile. “The divine Ms. Ciampi will be signing autographs at the stage door.”
Karp felt a familiar flood of relaxation, tinged with exhaustion and not a little resentment. The storm was over and once more his sweetheart had returned from the precipice to the world of the passably sane. He watched her thin body move as she hauled papers up onto the desk. It was clumsy work, but she made it a dance; in everything she was as graceful as a snake.
“What are you digging for, Marlene?”
“The fucking Segura file. Ah, here it is.”
“Marlene, are you really all right?”
The concern in his voice made her look up. “Yeah, I’m fine, now. I’ve been feeling real weird recently, weepy and, I don’t know … vaporous.
Thanks for putting up with me.” A real smile, this time. Karp felt his pupils expand.
“Um, hey, no problem. It’s a rough job, but somebody’s got to do it. Want to get some deli, later?”
“Yeah, sure. I need to call this social worker and start documenting the history of abuse. Great stuff. If I’m lucky, I can put her away until she’s too old to have any more kids. She’s twenty, by the way. Had the dead kid at fourteen.”
“I guess there’s no question she did it? I mean, for a mother to do something like that….”
“A mother? My dear, you would be amazed what mothers do. Mostly they let daddy do it, but sometimes they step right in and wale away. Like last month, we had one, a junkie, she held her daughter’s legs apart with her own hands while guys came in off the street and fucked the kid for two, three bucks a shot. Two years old, the kid was. Dislocated both hips as a matter of fact. Kid checked out in the hospital from shock and infection.”
“But what does what’s-her-name, Segura, the mother, what does she say? Does she admit it?”
“No, she doesn’t. She says she was sleeping off a drunk. She’s a wino. She says when she woke up the kid was gone. That’s all she knows, she says, until the cops came knocking. But there’s a history of serious child abuse there. The kid was in Bellevue last year with a busted arm. Fell down the stairs, hah-hah.”
Marlene let out a long, sad breath. “No, she probably did it, or there’s a boyfriend. Who we’ll probably have to dig up. Ask me why I do this work.”
“Why do you do this work?”
She fluttered her eyelids and put on a Miss America false smile. “Because I guess I just love people,” she said.
Karp leaned over and kissed her, something she normally objected to during office hours, but this time it seemed to be alright. More than alright.
When they surfaced, Karp murmured, “Here’s a sweet nothing for you—Tony just told me there were six hundred twenty-one homicides this year so far in New York. If you’d like to accompany me to the fast food restaurant of your choice this evening, we might get lucky and see one.”
“Or be one. Gosh, Butch, my eyes are shining. How romantic you are! But if we see a murder, we won’t have to get involved, will we?”
“Of course not! Us? Besides, the district attorney is a personal friend of mine.”