Hoax

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  At her seat, Marlene wondered where the cowboys—or ranch hands—were when the world needed them. She liked Dan Heeney, a sweet, intellectual boy, but he was not the sort to make a frightened young woman feel secure in the arms of a man again. She didn’t see Lucy, a scholar and language savant, settling down with a barely literate ranch hand, either. But for the moment she was happy that Lucy was discovering that a man could be both hard and soft. And for once, you horny slut, you don’t mean that sexually, she thought as she left the young couple dancing slowly, chest to chest, to the band’s rendition of Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

  Marlene went back to her room, undressed, and, breaking one of the rules of the center, called her husband, who, once he’d established that there was no emergency, reminded her that there was a two-hour time difference. “It’s 1:00 AM in Manhattan, you know,” he said yawning in her ear.

  “Well,” Marlene purred, “I just thought you might want to know that I’m lying naked on my big, king-size bed, with a fire going, which made me feel all…ummmm, how should I put this…ummmm, all warm and fuzzy…if you know what I mean.” She paused. “But I guess you want to go back to sleep…” She paused again but didn’t have to wait long for the response.

  “No, that’s okay…I really wasn’t tired.” Butch sounded suddenly wide awake. “Uh…what was that you were saying about being naked?”

  • • •

  Two weeks later, as she pulled into the parking lot of El Taoseno and alongside the Jojolas, Marlene recalled how the rest of that conversation had gone and laughed again.

  “Now what?” her daughter asked with mock exasperation.

  “Nothing,” Marlene said sweetly. “I was just thinking of something your father said a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Oh good. Glad you remembered him,” Lucy teased. “Father’s Day will be coming up soon.”

  Marlene smiled. Daddy’s little girl had always been beautiful in spirit even if she was no supermodel. However, she seemed to be blossoming, thanks, perhaps, to the desert air, Southwest sun, and the devoted attentions of a nice young man. In New York, she’d been too pale and thin. But her mother noted how good a tan looked on her daughter’s face and the rosy glow of her cheeks. She was even putting on a little weight in the right places through her newfound love for burritos, black beans, and fried sopapillas drenched in honey for dessert.

  Marlene didn’t kid herself that Taos had effected some sort of miracle cure for Lucy’s deeper issues, any more than it had for her. They left the door open at nights between their adjoining rooms, and there were many times she’d been awakened by Lucy crying out in her sleep. Troubled, it seemed, by dreams of demons and betrayal, but in the morning, Lucy, looking haggard, would say she couldn’t remember the nightmares.

  During the days she was a happy, active young woman. There’d been some initial frustrations out at the pueblo. Apparently, the Taos Indians were a secretive bunch when it came to sharing their culture and language. She’d explained to her mother that unlike almost all the other American Indian tribes who had been moved onto reservations that were not their traditional lands, the Taos Pueblo was the ancestral home of its people. Thus, they’d never lost continuity with their past or their language. She understood that they were protecting their culture from outside influences, and she’d respected their wishes. But she was gradually picking up the language by listening carefully to conversations between members of the tribe. Her gift for acquiring languages had impressed some of the natives—as it had language experts and brain researchers around the globe—and she reported that they were starting to open up a little with her.

  The Jojola boy in particular seemed to have developed something of a crush on her daughter. He engaged her in conversation every chance he got, which was how Lucy, then Marlene, knew that his father was the police chief for the pueblo. The boy had noted with pride that his dad was a decorated war hero from the Vietnam War and, sadly, that his mother had died when he was a young boy.

  • • •

  Inside the restaurant, Lucy suggested that she and Charlie eat at a separate table “so that you two can talk business.” When they were seated and had ordered drinks—a Coke and a margarita—Marlene smiled at Jojola. She dreaded the question that came to her tongue, but knew that whatever role she was to play made it necessary. “So, John,” she said, “tell me why you’re so interested in Lucy’s beads.”

  15

  ON THE SUNDAY MORNING A WEEK AFTER THE ARCHBISHOP’S fund-raiser, Butch Karp found himself in another uncomfortable situation arranged for him by Murrow. There he was, a tall, white Jewish district attorney standing at the pulpit of a black Baptist church in the middle of Harlem. Not that he minded being there; on the contrary, one of the things he loved best about New York City was the diversity of culture. But he felt as though he was intruding in a time set aside for something more important than politics.

  “I’d like to thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak to you this morning,” he said. “I know this is a time for family…and for worship. You don’t really need some guy to stand up here and tell you that you deserve better from the district attorney’s office of the county of New York; you already know it. So while I appreciate the invitation extended to me by the Rev. Jacobs”—he indicated a round man with a face the color of roasted coffee seated off to his side, who nodded solemnly back—“I realize that this is not the reason you are here today.”

  Murrow had been the one to accept Jacobs’s invitation, seeing yet another opportunity to make political hay. “Give a little speech after the sermon,” he’d said, “then join the congregation for a potluck afterward. Shake a few hands, hang around, and answer a couple of questions, eat and make loud comments about the deviled eggs being the best ever and that the chocolate cake is absolutely sinful. In and out, two hours max.”

  Karp was not entirely comfortable with Murrow’s cynical view of politicking. But he also knew he could not blame his assistant for doing what it took to get elected in the twenty-first century. He’d gone along with it, knowing that it was part of the warm-up drills in preparation for a campaign, just like the glad-handing at the fund-raiser.

  Still, if only it was as easy as Murrow had tried to make it sound. He looked out on the congregation and saw attitudes as varied as their faces and the hues of their Sunday finery. Some wore conservative suits and dresses of brown and navy blue. But others were proud as peacocks and nearly as gaudy in royal purples, shocking pinks, canary yellows, and fire-engine reds. Most indicated that they were at least going to show him the courtesy of listening to what he had to say, even if they sat with their faces blank and their hands on their laps. But others leaned back in the pews with their arms crossed and eyes bright with wariness, if not outright hostility. He was, after all, the man.

  Some of the hostility he understood. He represented a system that had sent too many of their sons, brothers, fathers, cousins, and uncles to prison. While he made no apologies for prosecuting criminals who deserved it, he also knew that the law was hardly color blind.

  He was well aware that to many officers of the New York Police Department, DWB—driving while black—was a felony. And that north of 110th Street, constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure were often suspended during routine traffic stops.

  Nor had the District Attorney’s Office been much better at ensuring equal protection—and prosecution—under the law. He knew the statistics as well as the criminal justice professors who cited them for the media. A black was much more likely to be prosecuted for the same crime as a white; the charges were apt to be higher and plea bargains less appealing. But the discrimination was spread throughout the system like a cancer that had metastasized.

  Frightened by a fear-mongering and exploitative media that sold newspapers and advertising minutes by playing up violent crime committed by poor urban blacks, which was actually down from a decade earlier, jurors were much more apt to convict a
black man based on the same evidence. Then judges handed down stiffer sentences and were much less likely to grant probation.

  Small wonder, Karp thought, that they see us as the enemy, not an ally. But an even greater sin in his mind was the lousy job the criminal justice system was doing of protecting the law-abiding citizens of the black community from predators in their midst.

  Most of the distrust and hostility he knew was generalized. But he was also aware that some of it was directed at him personally. Old accusations that he was a racist had cropped up again, ironically due to his efforts to reintroduce integrity to government.

  • • •

  One of the first things he had done when he took over for Keegan was to beef up the Rackets Bureau, which was responsible for pursuing allegations of official corruption and malfeasance. Corruption investigations were not something his two predecessors had taken very seriously—Bloom because it was a threat to himself and his cronies, Keegan because he did not want to rock any political boats that might upset his dream of becoming a federal judge.

  In the past, the bureau had been the dumping ground for the bottom tier of assistant district attorneys who were too lazy or too incompetent to be entrusted with actually trying felony cases. They weren’t any better at special investigations. From the bureau chief in charge on down to the lowliest ADA on the totem pole, most exhibited an extreme reluctance to go after anyone with more political juice than a cop on the take (and even then only if he or she lacked friends on the force) or some building inspector willing to take a blow job from the slumlord to look the other way on health code violations.

  They could not have imagined actually pursuing cases against anyone at the higher levels of government—such as a judge taking a bribe to throw a case involving a Colombian drug cartel, or city council members accepting illegal gifts in exchange for special favors. Adding to the bureau’s miasma, its investigators, who were supposed to do the legwork to gather evidence needed to bring charges, were retired cops who got the job because someone was owed a favor or knew someone who knew someone. They saw no reason to work any harder than the attorneys, so very little actually got done.

  Within a month of taking over as DA, Karp had cleaned out the bureau as if he were beating the dust out of an old rug. He’d lured his old friend and colleague V.T. Newbury away from the U.S. Treasury Department and placed him in charge. Newbury was the blue-blood scion of a named senior partner of a prestigious Madison Avenue law firm. His family could trace its ancestry to the first boat-load of immigrants to bump into Plymouth Rock. He was so wealthy that he had no real concept of money. But for reasons of his own, Newbury had gone into public service—first at the New York DA’s office and then for the U.S. Treasury Department—rather than a comfortable, if hardly challenging, partnership in his father’s firm “defending plastic surgeons from middle-aged women unhappy with their boob jobs.” Affable and charming, he was as sharp as one of his monogrammed tie tacks, and nearly impossible to faze. He was especially accomplished at investigating and prosecuting white collar crimes, the more complex and technologically challenging the better he liked them.

  Together, they’d offered the worst of the bureau’s attorneys early retirement, if they were eligible for it, or their walking papers if they weren’t. Those they felt could be “rehabilitated,” as V.T. put it, were kept on with the warning that their next stop if they didn’t shape up would be the wide sidewalk in front of 100 Centre Street. The vacated positions they filled with young, aggressive assistant DAs, some of them right out of law school, and all of whom were led to understand that an outstanding performance in the Rackets Bureau was a quick way to ascend to the lofty heights of the felony trial bureaus.

  After Clay Fulton had his DA’s police squad together and running smoothly, Karp asked him to take a look at the former cops working in special investigations. “Weed out the ones who don’t belong there, and find me someone who does,” he said.

  Heads had soon rolled. The vacancies were filled with a cadre of some of the NYPD’s former finest who’d tired of fishing for stripers off the coast or playing bridge with their wives and jumped at the chance to get back into the business. Fulton allowed them flexible hours, and somehow Karp found small pockets of money to bolster the wages so that it was a nice addition to their pensions.

  With the new attorneys and investigators in place, Karp left Newbury alone with a simple directive for the bureau: “Root out corruption, prosecute the guilty, convict them, and send them to prison for as long as the law allows. And another thing, where appropriate accept no lesser pleas.” He intended to make examples of those who betrayed the public’s trust, convinced that citizens would continue to lose confidence in the justice system until they could see that it was administered fairly and equitably. As long as he was in office, no man was above the law—whether he ate his dinners in Gracie Mansion or sold crack on the corner of 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in Harlem.

  Karp knew that an amped-up Rackets Bureau was going to bring a lot of heat back in his direction as important people started getting their feathers ruffled. It was simply unfortunate timing that the target of one of Newbury’s first investigations were several black city council members who were reportedly taking bribes to keep the police away from a certain Harlem nightclub suspected of fronting for a drug-dealing operation. That’s when the old accusations of racism began to resurface.

  Word of the investigation was leaked to the press, probably by those with reasons to shift the focus to a white district attorney who might have an ulterior motive. “He’s only pursuing this because it’s Harlem,” one unnamed source complained to the New York Post. “Everybody knows that it’s little rich white boys and girls who finance the cocaine trade, but it’s always poor black boys and black businessmen, who can’t always control everything that goes on in their establishments, who go to prison.”

  Fulton, who knew Karp as well as anyone outside his family, had angrily reported to his boss that the old nickname KKKarp was being bandied about. The name had originally been pinned on him because he’d failed to convict a rich white teenager who had a habit of killing elderly black women. Karp had done his best in that case, the only one he ever lost, but the defense attorney just beat him. His efforts didn’t stop the rabble-rousers in the black community from complaining that he’d thrown the case because the killer and his parents were wealthy and white.

  A lot of the former criticism had died down that past fall after Karp stepped in partway through the trial of two white police officers accused of gunning down a black immigrant. The black assistant DA prosecuting the case had been injured by a car bomb, so he’d had to take over. The defendants’ lawyer, Roland Hrcany, an old friend and former assistant DA, had argued the shooting was in self-defense and appeared to have the jury sold on his story. But in the eleventh hour, Karp had proved that the cops’ version of the shooting could not have happened the way they said it did. The officers were convicted and the agitators in the black community had no ammunition.

  However, if the current allegations being investigated by Newbury and his staff were true, there were a number of prominent members of the black community who had reason to play the race card. They had to hope that the DA’s office might back off when Karp realized the racist accusations might cost him the black vote and the race for district attorney. He didn’t care. If winning the election meant looking the other way, he didn’t want the job. Over the years, real-world cynicism had made inroads into the ideals of the young attorney who’d emerged from the University of California-Berkeley law school all bright and shiny and ready to take on evildoers, but it had not yet submerged them beneath the oily waters of political expediency.

  When the Rev. Jacobs extended the invitation to speak to his congregation, Murrow had suggested that Karp talk a little about his days as a basketball player. He’d been a prep All-American in high school, and one of the most sought-after recruits in the nation before signing with Cal
-Berkeley. Some pro scouts even thought he might be the next Bill Bradley, until a very large man landed on his knee during a game in his sophomore year and turned the ligaments into something resembling chopped spaghetti. Finished as a pro prospect, he’d turned that same competitive fire into pursuing his law degree, and kept it burning until he was one of the best trial lawyers in the country.

  Karp raised an eyebrow at Murrow’s suggestion. “Wouldn’t that be stereotyping to assume that just because they’re black they’d be interested in old basketball stories?”

  “I prefer to think of it as finding something that would interest any audience, an icebreaker to make everyone more comfortable,” Murrow sniffed. Even though he reveled in the dirty game of politics, he hated that anyone would think it had corrupted his liberal values.

  “It’s okay, Murrow, I know you’re just trying to help,” Karp said. “But if I can’t find something more important to talk about than basketball with these people, then I shouldn’t be wasting their time.”

  While the whole world—beginning with his assistant and Stupenagel—seemed to assume that he would run, Karp had not yet committed himself fully. So it caught him a little off guard when, after the sermon, Jacobs introduced him as “a candidate for district attorney, who’s here to talk to us a little bit about what can be done to make sure our kids are safe and decent people who can walk the streets of their neighborhoods without fear.”

  Karp rose from his seat in the front row and climbed the three steps to the pulpit where he began with his apology for interrupting their service. “I appreciate the Rev. Jacobs’ announcement, but I should say that I haven’t decided whether to run or not,” he continued. “However, I did want to talk to you a little bit today about what you have a right to expect from whoever is in that office. Then at least you’ll have something by which to judge the job I do or whoever replaces me.”