Without Fear or Favor

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “It is,” Pardo answered. “It looks just like it.”

  Karp placed the gun back in the bag. “Thank you. No further questions.”

  Judge Kershner looked at the clock on the wall. “Let’s take our afternoon recess. When we return, the witness is yours for cross-examination, Ms. Nash.”

  “I look forward to it,” Nash said coldly.

  “Very well, we’ll reconvene in fifteen minutes,” the judge said to the jurors.

  When the judge and jurors were gone, Karp and Katz went over to talk to Pardo, who’d remained silent and thoughtful on the witness stand.

  “Once a whore, always a whore, ain’t that right?” The voice was Johnson’s, who remained sitting next to Nash. “And fuck you, Karp,” he added. “Too bad that guy, what was his name, Oliver Gray, yeah, right, Oliver Gray, too bad he was such a poor shot. Next time, I hope somebody puts you down like a dog. Just like they’re gonna do that bitch.”

  The court officers jumped up and surrounded the defendant, but Karp told them to relax. Hoping to bait Johnson, he said, “Not to worry. He’s a coward who sets up kids to do his dirty work.”

  When Kershner arrived back in the courtroom, the chief court clerk told her what had transpired. The judge looked at Karp. “Is that true?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Mr. Johnson, any outburst from you will be dealt with severely in this courtroom,” Kershner warned.

  Johnson started to retort, but Nash put a hand on his shoulder and stated plaintively, “Your Honor, he’s under attack for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  Kershner raised her hand. “Stop right there. I stated precisely the behavior I expect in this courtroom. Don’t test me.”

  “I know my rights,” Johnson spat.

  “You have the right to take the stand in your defense,” Karp retorted, egging him on again.

  “That’s enough!” Kershner yelled. She glared from Johnson to Karp and back again. Satisfied that order was restored, she asked for the jury to be brought back in. She addressed them when they were seated. “When we left off, the district attorney had finished his direct examination of the witness. Ms. Nash, you may now proceed with your questioning.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” Nash said, striding out from behind the defense table and up to the witness stand. “That was quite the story, Ms. Pardo. But it seemed a little self-serving. I mean, do all dyslexic children end up drug-addicted prostitutes who will perjure themselves on a witness stand?”

  “OBJECTION!” Karp thundered. “Has counsel no sense of redemption, sensitivity, or civility?”

  “Sustained. Both counsel will please try to stay focused on the evidence.”

  Nash’s mouth twisted into a smirk. “Of course, Your Honor,” she said, then turned back to Pardo. “If I understand your testimony, you’ve admitted to committing crimes while working for Gary Proust, a New York City Police Department detective?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you cheated to become a cop, which makes you a liar. Correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And after you became an officer with the NYPD, sworn to uphold the law, you knew that your boyfriend, also a sworn officer, was committing crimes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you turn him in?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Why not?”

  “I loved him. I wanted him to stop of his own volition.”

  “Did that happen?”

  “No.”

  “Did you turn him in then?”

  “No.”

  “No, instead you continued to date him. You were his fiancée.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Nash crossed her arms. “Would you say that the NYPD is a corrupt organization?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that.”

  “But you testified that your boyfriend said ‘everybody’ has some sort of racket going.”

  “That’s what he said. That wasn’t my experience.”

  “Ms. Pardo, are there a lot of racist police officers at the NYPD?”

  “I’m sure there are some. But I never witnessed any acts of racism by a police officer.”

  “None whatsoever?” Nash asked, as if she found this hard to believe. “Just black and white officers working together, treating everyone on the streets with dignity and respect?”

  “As I said, I never witnessed any acts of racism, either between officers, or officers interacting with the community.”

  “Yet three officers were indicted last summer for murder and the attempted murder of black activists.”

  “I don’t know anything about that except what I’ve read in the newspapers, the same as anyone else.”

  “So this was just a one-time event.”

  “To my knowledge, yes.”

  Nash rolled her eyes and began walking along the jury box rail. “Let’s talk about you for a minute. So you’re a heroin addict?”

  “I was. But I’ve been clean for five months.”

  “Five months? Do you still crave it?”

  “Every day.”

  “Every day?”

  “Yes, every day is a battle to stay clean and sober.”

  “I see. And some of the side effects of long-term use of heroin are memory loss, paranoia, and depression. Is that true?”

  “I believe that’s correct.”

  “So you don’t always remember everything that happens to you?”

  “Depends. If I was high, maybe not. But my memory is pretty good, at least for those times I was sober.”

  “But you testified that heroin affects memory?”

  “It can.”

  “And were you high on heroin on the evening when you allegedly saw three men at the entrance of this alley in Harlem?”

  “I don’t remember,” Pardo said, “but probably not. I didn’t have much money at that time.”

  “And nobody wanted to pay to have sex with you, correct?”

  Karp saw that the question stung. But Pardo smiled. “I don’t think I could have given it away.”

  The humor caught Nash off guard as the gallery tittered with laughter. The defense attorney scowled and set her jaw. “I believe you testified that you were willing to do anything for heroin, is that right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Commit crimes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perform sex acts in filthy alleys and restroom stalls?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that you violated the oath you took as a police officer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lied and cheated.”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “Well, basically it sounds like you’ve lied, cheated, committed crimes, done drugs your entire adult life?”

  “Yes. Pretty sad, isn’t it?”

  Again, Nash was caught off guard for a moment, as if she didn’t know how to answer that response. Then her face hardened. “You sold your body for drugs.”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that like selling your soul?”

  “That’s not a bad analogy.”

  “I think it’s a rather good analogy,” Nash retorted. “So I have to ask you, have you sold your soul to the prosecution?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, let’s look at the evidence. Eight months ago, you were prostituting yourself, sleeping on park benches, and eating in Dumpsters. Now here you are, wearing nice clothes, living in a women’s shelter where I assume you’re safe, warm, and well fed. And you’re taking courses at a community college. It would seem that your life took a sudden, miraculous turnaround after you went to the district attorney with your story.”

  “Yes, my life is better. But I’m the one making it better, with the help of people at the shelter.”

  “Or was it the district attorney who came along and told you what to say?”

  “Objection!” Karp shouted as he stood. “Ms. Nash is making wild accusations without one scintilla of evidence to back
them up. If she has it, she should put it before this jury now.”

  “Sustained,” Kershner said, shaking her head. “Ms. Nash, you must know better.”

  Nash’s face was pulled into a sneer. “No further questions.”

  Kershner shook her head and looked at Karp. “Anything more?”

  Karp, who had remained standing, nodded. “Just a couple more questions,” he said, and looked at Pardo.

  “Ms. Pardo, you told me once and testified that as a young police officer, you dreamed of taking a bad guy off of the street.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this the way you imagined it?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, was it your dream to appear on the witness stand and be exposed as a liar, a drug addict, a cheater, and a whore?”

  Pardo shook her head. “No. This isn’t a dream, it’s a nightmare.”

  Karp nodded. “I’m sure. So I want to ask you, why should this jury believe you when you testified that you saw the defendant, Anthony Johnson, and his associate, George Parker, as well as Ricky Watts in that alley? And why should they believe that you saw the defendant hand Ricky Watts a stainless steel, forty-five-caliber revolver with a mother-of-pearl handle and say, ‘If they’re still moving, shoot them in the head’?”

  Pardo looked over at Nash and then at Johnson. “Because why would I have put myself through this if every single thing I’ve said today wasn’t true?”

  “Now that,” Karp said, “is a good question. Nothing further, Your Honor.”

  23

  THE NEXT MORNING, KARP WAS finally able to relax, knowing that the toughest part of his job was done. Step-by-step, piece by piece, the evidence had been laid out in damning order, drawing the noose tighter and tighter around the defendant’s neck.

  Now all that was left of the People’s case was tying up some loose ends.

  Karp first called Patrolman Brad Nickles, who had responded to the scene of the Watts shooting and taken a statement from George Parker. The officer identified People’s Exhibit 32, the photograph of Big George, as the man he interviewed and later arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

  Karp wasn’t sure if Nash had missed that particular memo book entry made by Nickles immediately after questioning Big George at the scene. There’d been a mountain of paperwork surrounding the shooting and subsequent investigation. Nash kept her head down and hardly looked up during the officer’s testimony. “No questions,” she mumbled when Kershner invited her to cross-examine the witness.

  Putting the finishing touches on the attempted murder charge, Karp called two residents who lived in the tenement where Kim and Watts had their fatal meeting. The first, eighty-two-year-old Martha Motumbo, was the woman Kim had seen in the doorway with her grandchildren as he pursued Watts down the staircase. “I heard two gunshots,” the woman testified, “and looked to see what was happening.”

  “You’re sure it was two?” Karp asked.

  “I may be old, but I ain’t deaf,” Motumbo scolded Karp, who was as amused by her cantankerous testimony as was the rest of the courtroom. “Same thing I told that investigator who said he worked for the defense attorney. He kept trying to get me to change my story, but I heared what I heared. It was two shots. You don’t live as long as I have in the projects without knowing what a gun, or two guns, sound like. Now can I go?”

  Nash released the witness without asking any questions. Nor did she challenge the testimony of the second resident, Elmira Jenkins, who had solved the one great mystery to the whole Kim and Watts confrontation: the absence of a spent bullet fired from the revolver, or bullet fragments, or even a mark left by a bullet in the wall of the staircase.

  Several times in the days leading up to the trial, Karp had pulled out the photograph Fulton had given him of the building taken after the shooting. The only other place a bullet could have gone was out the window, but the window was closed and intact in the photograph. Then he recalled Kim’s statement that as he approached the landing where he would find himself challenged by Watts, he’d seen a woman duck back from the hallway into her apartment. A thought crossed his mind and he decided to check it out in the company of Fulton.

  They’d located the woman, who admitted she’d been in the hall when she heard the officer approaching from the stairs above her. But she was reluctant to say much more than that.

  “You’re not in any trouble here,” Karp assured her as they led her out into the hall. “But was there any chance that window was open when you went back inside?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” Jenkins said. “The building superintendent doesn’t let us open those windows. He says it lets in dirt and bugs . . . not like this place is so clean.”

  Karp nodded. “Well, okay, if you’re sure. It’s just that I need to know the truth. It would explain a lot, and there are some people’s lives at stake here.”

  As he and Fulton turned to walk back down the stairs and leave, Jenkins called after them. “Wait. I can’t live with the lie if you put it that way.”

  She explained that she lived with her daughter and son-in-law, and they wouldn’t let her smoke in their apartment. “I’m afraid to go down to the streets to smoke,” she said. “So I sneak out here and open the window to get some fresh air and smoke. When I heard the police officer coming down the stairs, I thought it was the superintendent. I panicked and ran inside, but I forgot to close the window. Then afterward, I was worried I’d get in trouble, so I sneaked back and closed it before the police got here.”

  The woman hung her head and began to cry. “I guess I better start looking for a new place to live,” she said.

  However, Karp and Fulton put their heads together and came up with a plan. Fulton accompanied the woman to the superintendent’s office. “Mrs. Jenkins here is a star witness in our case,” he said gruffly. “She has provided us with very valuable information involving the window in the hallway outside her apartment. But she is concerned that you may retaliate because of a small infraction of the rules. So I’m here to ask you, nicely, if you would overlook this small infraction—if she promises not to do it again—and in return, I’ll make sure that no one troubles you about the smell of marijuana that permeates this building.”

  “Of course,” the superintendent said. “Mrs. Jenkins is one of my favorite residents, and I would never want to cause her any trouble.”

  Jenkins had then happily testified about the open window. “I watch a lot of CSI on the television,” she said when Karp talked to her afterward. “I’ve always wanted to be on the witness stand.” There was no way of proving that the bullet fired by Watts had gone out the window, but “common sense and logic,” as Karp intended to point out during his summation, would indicate that was what happened.

  Following Motumbo and Jenkins, Karp had called Rose Torres, who talked about the party the night Officer Tony Cippio was murdered. “I know it was then, because the shooting was all over the television news the next morning,” she said. “I remembered that Big George and Ny-lee was acting crazy, like they’d done something but wouldn’t say what it was. Then Nat X—”

  “The defendant, Johnson,” Karp interjected.

  “Yes, that fool sitting right over there.” She pointed. “He showed up and everybody was treating him like the ‘big man.’ Ny-Lee and him was cousins, but he got real mad when Ny-Lee called him ‘Tony’ instead of Nat X.”

  Torres laughed at Johnson. “What kind of fool name is that anyway?” she said, eliciting an objection from Nash.

  “Sustained. The witness is instructed to stick to just answering the question,” Kershner said.

  “Yeah, all right,” Torres replied. “But I ain’t afraid of him. He was only tough as long as he had George and that big ol’ gun of his to wave around. But you know what they say: ‘Big gun, small—’ ”

  “Could you describe the gun?” Karp interrupted as the spectators laughed and Johnson scowled.

  “Yeah, silver, sort of like a cowboy
gun.”

  “A revolver?”

  “Yeah, with a shiny handle. Not the sort of piece you usually see in the hood, especially with some no-account like him.”

  Torres identified the gun when Karp showed it to her. She then verified that she’d picked both Parker and Johnson out of photo lineups, and Johnson again after the defendant was extradited from California. “I didn’t need no one-way mirror,” she declared. “I’d a told him to his face. ‘You that dumbass nigger who talked tough all the time, but when the heat was on, you turned tail and ran away to California with my baby sister.’ But she’s dumb as a stick, too, so they deserve each other.”

  Recognizing that Torres was a bit of a loose cannon, Karp got her off the stand as soon as he could. She was upset that she wouldn’t be allowed to talk about her belief that Parker had killed Ny-Lee on Johnson’s orders. He wasn’t going to risk her blurting it out because he asked one too many questions.

  Nash tried without success to challenge Torres’s recollection of when the party happened. “And if you knew all this, why didn’t you come forward and say something to the police?”

  “Snitches get stitches and end up in ditches. I wasn’t afraid of him,” she said, nodding at Johnson, “but Big George was something else. Now, he was a scary man.”

  Noting that Torres had a criminal record for drug possession and sales, Nash asked if her coming forward was to “rack up some get-out-of-jail-free points for the next time you get in trouble with the law?”

  “Ain’t gonna be no next time,” Torres retorted. “I got a new man and he don’t abide drugs. He got himself a good job working at a bank, and I ain’t gonna mess that up for him. We going to church every Sunday and everything.”

  After Torres stepped down, Karp called Mike “Moto Juku” Sakamoto to the stand to recount the sudden appearance and overly long stay of Anthony Johnson and his girlfriend, Lupe Torres. “My girlfriend wanted him gone and so did I,” he said. “But he made sure we knew he was armed, even after he pawned the revolver.”

  Giving away how she planned to explain the events in San Francisco during her summation, Nash intimated that the revolver was Juku’s. At best, it was a flimsy attempt to deflect the blame, but considering all the testimony from the New York witnesses about the gun, it was all she had. And when Juku left the witness stand, both the defense lawyer and her client were taking on the appearance of a thoroughly beaten football team.