Hoax

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Beginning with former mayor Ed Koch and continuing through Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor’s office had done a lot for New York’s image with tourists by insisting that the police focus on so-called quality of life crimes. That meant clamping down on such desperate criminal enterprises as urinating in public, panhandling, sex show solicitation, sleeping in the open, street prostitution, and the small-time crooks who made their living as pickpockets or con men. The theory put forth publicly was that these misdemeanors were committed by the same people responsible for the felonies. But the real motive was to clean up the environs that the tourists saw—such as Times Square and the Village—which it did, but the policy also just pushed the human blemishes off the main avenues and into surrounding neighborhoods where real New Yorkers actually lived.

  Karp understood the reasoning, even had to admit that it was pleasant not being accosted by beggars at every corner or having to step over heroin junkies lying on the sidewalks in puddles of piss. Times Square was no longer the squalid cesspool of drug dealings and raunchy sex; it was, in fact, family-friendly and more reminiscent of Walt Disney than Herbert Huncke, the Times Square junkie made famous by the Beat Generation of writers. But Karp felt that if all the various street people of New York disappeared, he would miss at least some them. They were part of the quilt, too, and therefore he was happy that not all had allowed themselves to be ushered off into the sunset.

  “Thank choo,” Booger sneezed, smiling to reveal ragged rows of brown teeth. He turned and began to shuffle up Canal, the crowd parting around him like a school of herring escaping a hungry sea lion.

  As Karp approached the newsstand on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, he was greeted by another character who added to the adventure of his daily walk to work. “Good morning, Butch, fucking piece of shit,” the man who ran the newsstand called out.

  “Good morning, Warren,” Karp replied.

  “Ass wipe,” the man with the watery blue eyes and thick lips replied. “Doing well, thank you, turd eater.”

  Karp smiled. He took no offense at the man’s language. Dirty Warren, as he was known at the courthouse, had Tourette’s syndrome, a short circuit in his brain that caused him to frequently let loose stentorian streams of profanity unsurpassed in the western hemisphere for color and variety.

  “What have you got for me today?” Karp said as he paid for the Times and the Post.

  “Jennifer Aniston’s real fuck you last name, piss me off douche bag.”

  “Trying to trip me up with the youngsters?” Karp said. Guessing the real names of movie stars was a game they’d played almost as long as they’d known each other, which was more than twenty years. Warren had yet to stump Karp and was apparently running out of vintage material.

  The man now gave him a smug look and crossed his arms across his concave chest. “No piss shit rules against it, butt hole.”

  Karp shrugged. “Okay then, Anistonapoulos. Greek I believe.”

  “Fuck bitch pussy,” Warren moaned as Karp began to move away. “Wait!” he yelled in desperation. “What about Madonna?”

  Karp pulled up short. “Madonna? That’s not fair. She’s not a movie star.”

  “Sure ass wipe she is,” Warren announced triumphantly. “She was in Evita and A League of Their Own. Her first blow job name is Madonna, but what scumbag vagina is the rest?” He noted the stymied look on Karp’s face and began to dance a little jig that rocked his newsstand. “I fuck hell got him slut!” he yelled, startling a blue-haired older woman walking her Pekingese past the stand in her nightgown. “I fucking got him!”

  “Moron,” the woman yelled back, one of her false eyelashes shaking loose from the effort. The Pekingese snarled, and they tottered off down the sidewalk as fast as their short legs could carry them.

  Warren ignored the woman, but his smile disappeared when he saw Karp’s perplexed look change to a wicked grin. “Doesn’t make her an actress. But just to ruin your day, it’s Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone.”

  “Ah, you fucker,” Warren swore.

  “Hey, that wasn’t TS-inspired,” Karp laughed.

  “How would sphincter clit you know, shithead,” the man groused.

  “I know the difference,” Karp said. “And you know you’re at least supposed to try to watch your language.”

  “Can’t help it, twat-nosed monkey fucker eat me,” Warren giggled.

  “Yeah, right,” Karp said, giving him a sideways glance. He was never quite sure that all of Dirty Warren’s X-rated vocabulary was attributable to his disease. Karp knew that TS had many other less extreme manifestations, but there was no proof that Warren was putting him on. Innocent until fuck shit piss proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, he thought.

  He wove his way through the foot traffic on the remaining hundred feet to the courthouse entrance—glancing to either side to assure himself that the inscriptions remained—and entered through the door marked for “employees with identification badges only.” Over to his right, the usual crowd was standing in line to empty their pockets, throw their purses and cell phones into the X-ray machines, then step through the metal detectors where, if they set off a beep, they were told to raise their hands while a bored-looking New York City police officer frisked them with a wand.

  Karp wondered what good such efforts actually were, considering that terrorists, who’d posed as heating and air-conditioning repairmen, managed to import the components of a large bomb into the basement just seven months earlier. He guessed that people just wanted to feel safer after September 2001 and had in an amazingly short amount of time from his point of view accepted any inconvenience, or abridgement of privacy rights, that gave even the appearance of a more secure world.

  • • •

  Walking into the lobby of 100 Centre Street was like flying into a beehive. The air droned with hundreds, nay thousands, of voices adding to the sound of people walking, shuffling papers, elevators ringing, and an orchestra of cell phones rendering a myriad of tunes from “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to the William Tell “Overture.” Meanwhile, all the little worker bees ignored everything else to hurry to their assigned tasks, while visitors buzzed around in a daze trying to figure out how to get to whatever courtroom or office they were late in arriving at.

  For perhaps the billionth time, he reflected that a cultural anthropologist would have had a doctoral dissertation handed to him or her on a platter by observing the human interactions of genus Homo New Yorki Criminalcourtus within the polished stone walls of 100 Centre Street. Approaching slowly and avoiding eye contact like Jane Goodall with her chimps, a scientist could move close to killers and con men, as well as expectant teenagers seeking restraining orders against the multiple fathers of their children. Making no sudden moves that might disturb them, the careful observer might place himself dangerously close to sullen alpha male gangbangers eyeballing each other as they waited for their court-appointed lawyers while their haggard and tearful mothers stood next to them wondering where they went wrong.

  Heck, he thought, there was probably a chair at Syracuse University for the brave soul who conducted a study on the subset Homo New Yorki Criminalcourtus lawyera. He mused over what the proper term for a gathering of attorneys would be. A gaggle? A herd or a pack? Or maybe—and most appropriately, like cows—a murder of lawyers.

  The lawyers tended to come in three basic species. The least numerous were the assistant district attorneys, who marched through the crowds in working-stiff suits with the grim countenances of the true defenders of justice and the American way. That or bored out of their gourds and biding their time until they went over to the dark side of the force and entered into private practice.

  Then there was the top echelon of defense lawyers—the partners and associates from big firms whose clients could actually pay for legal representation. They were the ones in the Armani suits who protected their cherished clients by walking with one arm around their shoulders and the other out to shield them from the rabble.


  Lastly, there were the two subspecies of public defenders. Those who—like the young district attorneys, and usually young themselves—wore the poverty of their wardrobe and their still-untainted idealism like badges of honor. And secondly, those who had been at it for a few years and now mostly wore tired, pained expressions. Their shoulders tended to sag when they entered the courthouse, sighing at the thought of another day in hell defending Satan’s minions.

  As Karp walked up to the elevators, a young black public defender in a pink bow tie and horn-rim glasses was lecturing a man old enough to be his father. “This is it, Henry,” he said, dipping his head and peering over his glasses to force Henry to look him in the eye. “You’ve had a couple of weeks to see what jail’s like…and it’s going to be a lot worse up at Attica if you don’t quit drinkin’ and hittin’ your wife. That what you want, Henry? A few years locked up with killers, and gangsters, and rapists? Men who would sell their own mothers for the change in your pocket?”

  “No,” Henry said sullenly, his eyes darting in all directions to avoid the lawyer’s gaze.

  “Well, you remember that when the judge asks if you’ve got anything to say before sentencing,” the young lawyer said. “You’re going to promise that you will never ever drink again or hit your wife. And then we are going to beg, and I mean down on our knees and sobbing for mercy, for the judge to put you on home detention and weekly urine tests. And if he goes for it, every time you feel like having a little drink, I want you to imagine what it’s going to be like at night in your cell when they turn out the lights and the screaming starts.”

  Couldn’t have said it better, Karp thought. He pushed the button to summon the elevator, but suddenly there was a commotion in the lobby behind him. A loud voice rang out, bouncing off the marble walls and causing several women to shriek as if they’d been personally assaulted. “AND I LOOKED,” the voice boomed, “AND BEHOLD, A BLACK HORSE…”

  The owner of the voice pawed his way through the crowd toward Karp like a man swimming against the current. He swept aside gangsters and secretaries, lawyers and bail bondsmen, until he stood alone ten feet from Karp. An odiferous match for Booger, the man was wearing an army field jacket and tie-dyed T-shirt that stated Grateful Dead World Tour 1976 over the image of a smiling, dancing skeleton. His stained khaki pants appeared to be supported by a rope belt, and his sandals were held together with duct tape. Long, frizzy gray hair stood out from his head as though at some point in the past he’d licked his finger and stuck it in a light socket. He now looked at Karp with blue eyes that jutted from their sockets as if something was squeezing him around his chest, pointed a crooked finger, and said in a shower of spittle: “AND HE WHO SAT ON IT HAD A PAIR OF SCALES IN HIS HANDS…”

  Whatever the man intended to say next was cut off by the choke hold applied to him from behind by a police officer, who took him to the ground and held him while another slapped handcuffs on his wrists. “Sorry, Mr. Karp,” the officer with the choke hold apologized. “He wasn’t acting strange or nothin’ when he came through security. Not until he saw you. You know him?”

  Karp looked hard, trying to see the face without all the hair and the patchy beard; maybe he’d prosecuted him at some point in the past. The man was not struggling or trying to say anything else; in fact, he almost appeared to be catatonic, staring into the floor as though he were looking into some other universe. Karp shook his head. “Can’t say I do.”

  “His name’s Edward Treacher,” said a raspy, muffled voice behind him.

  Karp jumped and turned toward the voice, relieved to see its owner. “Jesus, Guma, you sound more like Marlon Brando in The Godfather every day,” he said.

  Ray Guma grabbed the lapels of his pin-striped suit and struck a mob pose. “Hey paisan, just getting back to my roots after so many years on the wrong side of the law.”

  Laughing, Karp said, “There have been times we’ve wondered which side you thought was the right one. But you were saying about our friend here, Mr. Treacher?”

  Guma shrugged. “Actually, I don’t know much. Once prosecuted him on a lewd conduct back in the midseventies, when that little incident with the hooker in the interview room got me demoted to Misdemeanors and Miscreants for six months. If I remember correctly, he was offering five-dollar blow jobs in the men’s room at Shea Stadium. Had a pretty good little business going, too, and the Mets were winning, until the cops nabbed him…season over for him and the team. Anyway, I was told by our investigators that he used to be a professor of religious studies over at NYU until he dropped some bad acid in the late 1960s, went to go find God, and never really came back. Apparently a pal of Timothy Leary, and spent some time in San Francisco with the Merry Pranksters of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test fame. Now apparently believes he’s God’s messenger boy, Heaven’s own FedEx deliveryman. He’s been around here off and on for the past twenty years when not recuperating at Bellevue; surprised you haven’t seen him before. Some of the regulars, like Warren, call him The Prophet because of his biblical rantings, but mostly they think he’s just another harmless brain-fried hippy.”

  The pair watched the police pick up Treacher and half-carry, half-guide him back to a security lockup until they could decide what to do with him. “Well, that was as good as a cup of coffee,” Karp said.

  “Yeah, you never know when one of these guys will raise a gun, or maybe a knife, instead of a finger,” Guma said enthusiastically. “Gets the old ticker pumping.”

  “Thanks for the encouraging news,” Karp replied as they moved past a row of gum-chomping, miniskirted prostitutes sitting on one of the wood benches outside of AR1, the arraignment courtroom. His arrival precipitated a cacophony of whistles and catcalls.

  “Hey, Butch,” cooed a large black hooker with hair the color of a tangerine. “How about I come back to your office and show you a good time in exchange for time off for good behavior?”

  “You must have me mixed up with my friend Guma here,” he said. “Better talk to him about any plea bargains taken in trade.”

  Guma had never let scruples stand in the way of a piece of ass. A native son of New Jersey, the Italian Stallion, as he’d billed himself for years, wasn’t quite the stud of his younger years because of the cancer that had caused the surgeons to remove most of his intestines. But apparently that hadn’t stopped him from trying.

  At the mention of Guma, the carrot-topped hooker sneered. “Screw him. He only wants somethin’ fer nuttin’…. And I mean nuttin’,” she said, holding up a bent pinkie finger. The other whores all burst into knowing cackles.

  “Hey, I resemble that,” Guma lamented as the elevator arrived and they stepped on. Guma got out his cell phone and started dialing. Karp quickly scanned the front page of the papers and then the cover of the Metro Section in the Times. He breathed a sigh of relief not to find what he’d been dreading—any suggestion of a story about the two bodies found in the Rambles area of Central Park on Friday morning. He hated to admit it, but he owed Stupenagel. She’d been contacted by some informant who’d led her to the graves, and to her credit—or her avarice, he wasn’t sure which—she’d called in the police without raising a fuss that would have brought the rest of the media swarming.

  Two days earlier when he learned about the bodies and her involvement, he’d swallowed his pride and called to ask if she would hold off on the story for a couple of days until the police could identify the bodies and get a jump on the investigation. He suspected that she did it more so that she would have a scoop in the Village Voice when the first installment on her series about him came out on Tuesday, but she’d agreed after whining a little about “the public’s right to know and my responsibilities as a journalist” just to make sure he understood that he owed her big. “And on the condition that I get to beat you with a baseball bat if something gets leaked to one of my competitors before then.”

  “The people of the city and county of New York thank you for your civic-minded response,” he said sarca
stically.

  “Fuck that,” she answered right back. “I’m half hoping Murrow tells the Post just so I can get my forty whacks.”

  So far, Stupenagel had honored the agreement. And as of the morning’s Times and Post, he was in no danger of a thrashing.

  The time had allowed the police to move forward without the press nosing around. After the investigators located the graves, they called in forensic anthropologist Dr. Nathan Perriwinkle of NYU to excavate the bodies. Then Saturday afternoon, Karp, Rebecca DeAntonio, one of the sharp young ADAs in the homicide bureau who would be handling the case, and the police detectives in charge of the investigation met with Perriwinkle and three other scientists he’d invited along at the grave sites.

  “Both victims were male, approximately ten to twelve years old, judging from bone growth and dentition,” said Perriwinkle, a thin, grandfatherly man with a shock of white hair that stood out on his head like a snowdrift. “The skulls identified them as either Asian or American-Indian. We noted what appeared to be very severe lacerations to the flesh at the front of the throat consistent with having been cut with a sharp instrument; as you know, the New York Medical Examiner’s Office has confirmed that the loss of blood from those wounds was the probable cause of death. No weapons or evidence of weapons, such as bullet fragments, were located in the graves or the bodies. Based on the level of decomposition, within a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, I believe that they were buried four to eight weeks apart, and from nine to twelve months ago. I believe this estimate will be borne out by my colleagues.”

  Perriwinkle gave way to the other scientists, who all added their bit. The first was a forensic botanist, Dr. Hannah Olivinski, who reported that she’d studied the clipping of roots that had been cut and left behind when the killer dug the graves, as well as new shoots that had pierced the walls since. “The clippings vere still in an active growth stage when they vere cut, one more so than the other, which precludes vinter,” Olivinski, a short, thick woman with a trace of a Russian accent, said. “Most of the new growth into the graves occurred simultaneously and since the spring thaw, as opposed to prior to vinter. That would mean the graves vere dug sometime in late summer, or more likely early fall, just before the plants vent dormant. That, of course, does not mean the bodies vere deposited there at that time. For that I defer to Dr. Hobbes.”