Resolved kac-15

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  "But, sir, you yourself just taught us that an object in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force, is that true?"

  "Yes."

  "And according to you, this bullet was absolutely shot from Mr. Onabajo's body, having changed its path by one hundred or so degrees. Your hydrostatic rebound would have had to have added energy to the bullet for that to have happened, yet the only source of hydrostatic pressure came from the bullet itself, correct?"

  "Yes, but it's more complicated-"

  "Your theory of bullet seven violates one of the central theories of physics, does it not?"

  "No, it-"

  "The ball somehow has bounced higher rather than lower on the second bounce!"

  "No, I-"

  "You're a scientist, doctor. Isn't it true that it's a scientific precept always to go with the simpler of two explanations? Occam's razor I believe it's called."

  Selwyn mumbled in the affirmative.

  "And isn't the simplest explanation for the condition and penetration of bullet number seven the fact that Mr. Onabajo was lying on his back helpless when Detective Gerber shot it through his gut?"

  "No."

  "And confronted with this straightforward situation, you concocted a ballistic solution out of whole cloth to earn your pay from the defense?"

  "No."

  "And one last thing, Dr. Selwyn-" here Karp swung around so he could eye the jury, "when you were studying physics in high school… did the dog ever eat your homework?"

  Objection, roars of laughter, bang of gavel, remonstration from the bench, to which Karp replied, "My apologies, Your Honor, withdrawn. And nothing further."

  There was a silent pause after that when everyone looked at Roland, to see if he would attempt to repair his sweating and hapless witness on redirect, but Roland wisely declined, and the court recessed for lunch.

  ***

  "You were terrific," said Lucy as they walked away from the courtroom, ignoring the massed cameras and microphones lurking in the hallway, and the cries of the reporters. "I didn't think they allowed one-liners like that."

  "Technically, they don't. It just came to me and I let it out. Selwyn looked exactly like a kid I knew in junior high, not his face, but the expression on it, someone caught in a hopeless pathetic lie."

  "Will you get in trouble?"

  "Not really. Higbee is pretty straitlaced and he'll probably call me into chambers and give me a mild spanking. On the other hand, he wasn't averse to seeing a lying witness embarrassed."

  "Why did Roland do it? I thought he was pretty good."

  "Roland is very good, but he's playing the hand another lawyer left him, which is always sticky. Klopper likes to use a lot of expert trickology, figuring the jury will lean toward the defense if there's enough confusion thrown up. Dueling experts? Hey, there's your reasonable doubt. Roland has a different style. He's going to want to put the jury in the shoes of the two cops. Dark night, fearsome criminal struggling for the officer's pistol, do you really want to second-guess two sworn officers? Would you have acted any differently?"

  "But Onabajo wasn't a fearsome criminal. He sold fake Rolexes in Herald Square."

  Karp laughed. "Some people would consider that a death-qualified crime. But in Roland's summation he'll argue that they had the victim confused with a very bad guy, and when the man went for the cop's gun, their instinct took over. Of course, they regret it, he'll say, and also there's some doubt about the position of the victim in relation to the two guns, reasonable people can disagree, blah blah blah, let's call it a tragic confrontation and move on, which is why he decided to keep Selwyn's testimony. The subtext is, do you people really want some cop to get killed in a dark hallway because he's afraid of using his gun?"

  "It won't work, though, right?"

  "It might. Unless I can show that these are not the hero type of cops from Nine Eleven, but the cowardly, murdering-type cops from before. That means I have to impeach one of the cops, show they're telling a bold-faced lie up there on the stand. I have to show guilty knowledge and prevarication, which always trumps the tragic circumstances defense. To tell you the truth, it's driving me crazy, there's this gigantic hole in their story but I can't put my hand on it. It's like it's too obvious to be seen. Where are you taking me, by the way?"

  "We're having a picnic in the park."

  "No kidding? To what do I owe? It's not my birthday, is it?"

  "No, it's just that it occurred to me that it's summer and everyone is sort of lazing around except you, and also that when I was going to school in the city we used to spend a lot of time together, playing b-ball, and hanging out, and we hadn't done hardly anything together, so I thought, I'll just run down to the courthouse and get my father to eat a healthy and delicious lunch instead of a lump of grease chozerai…"

  "Oh, no, not healthy…?"

  "Yes, and it's all bought. All you have to do is enjoy."

  They walked a block or so to Columbus Park, behind the courthouse, and sat in a sycamore's shade, where Lucy had laid out a blanket and a Styrofoam box, and set her mastiff to insure nobody else ate it while she was gone. There was a salad with lumps of some sweet flesh in it, cold soba noodles with a spiced peanut sauce, a kind of iced tea in large, gaudily printed bottles, and a bloody sheep's thighbone, which was flung at the dog.

  "Gosh, Luce, this is a meal fit for a king," said Karp, "supposing the king was training for the triathlon. What is this?"

  "It's abalone salad."

  "Is that like a bologna sandwich?"

  "Almost," she said, laughing, and they ate their lunch companionably, not talking much, while Karp tried to think of what good deeds he had done in order to deserve such a daughter, and as always came up blank. Lucy in the meantime was exercising her primary religious talent, which was not, as some might have thought, her ability to see apparitions of the saints, but rather simply keeping still and reflecting in peace and gratitude. This had a radiating effect on the other lunchers. The dog fell into a dream of chasing men, and Karp lapsed into a semitrance, during which he forgot for a few moments the details of People v. Gerber amp; Nixon.

  "There's that guy again," she said.

  Karp snapped into full awareness. "What guy?"

  "No, you can't see him anymore, he went behind a truck. But I'm sure it was him. I saw him on Spring Street watching G.C. play music. Then I saw him again when I went into the DA entrance. A big brown guy with a fringe beard, wearing workclothes. I'm sure he was watching me just now."

  Karp suppressed a tremor of fear. "Any idea who he is?"

  "No, but I think I saw him going toward that work site at the back of the courthouse, on Baxter."

  "That would explain what he's doing around here. They're replacing all the ductwork and pulling in a new climate control, which is why you can smell lead in the courtrooms. How worried are you about this?"

  "Not very. Actually, I was more worried about this other guy who was hanging around the kitchen. I told you about him already. I ran into him outside our place the other day. Apparently he knew where to find me and was looking for me. I gave him a wad of cash and took off."

  "Was that wise?"

  She smiled at him. "Oh, you know me, the softest touch in the city. I give the most to the ones I can't stand."

  "Hello?"

  "It's sort of a Catholic thing, Dad. Weird."

  "Indeed. You'll let me know if either of these guys bothers you again, okay?"

  "Okay."

  "No, really."

  "Really," she said, almost meaning it.

  ***

  When Paul Agnelli walks into Russo's, Marlene is finishing her second glass of wine. She looks meaningfully at her watch.

  "I know I'm late, Mar, I got into a thing with a son of a bitch purveyor, Frascato Brothers, all of a sudden he wants cash on delivery, like we haven't been buying fucking lamb from them for thirty years." She can smell the meat on his clothes. He still wears the greasy boots he wore at his sh
op.

  Marlene tosses back the remains of her wine and signals for another round. They move to the dimness of a booth. "They're worried about you because of this thing?"

  "Yeah, and fuck them all! All of a sudden I'm cancer in the business."

  "How's the trade been?"

  A hand-waggling gesture. "A little off. People know me, they know it's horseshit; also, where they gonna go for my veal? But I need to get clear of this, you know? Soon."

  "Yeah, I know. Look, the reason I wanted to meet with you- were you aware that there's no rape kit on Cherry Newcombe?"

  "There's not? They told me they had it."

  "Yeah, well, you know, the cops are not obligated to tell the whole truth to a suspect."

  "Well, fuck, that means she never got raped, the lying little cunt."

  "No, it doesn't mean that at all. The cops still have a semen match with you, like you told me, but it's not from a rape kit. I checked. It's from her clothes. Underpants, to be exact."

  "Like Clinton and what's-her-name."

  "Just like. So the question is the big one I asked you when I first took this on. Sexual partners. I have in fact spoken to Tina Farnese and Nellie Simms. They're both fairly active sexually, they recall you fondly, but I didn't get any inkling that they wanted to do you a bad, or would help someone who wanted to do you one. On the other one you told me about, Brandy or whoever…?"

  "No way. I got out of bed right after and flushed the condom."

  "Then think harder, pal, because for some reason Terry Palmisano is after your Italian ass."

  Agnelli drinks wine, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and in a wounded tone says, "I thought as much as I can think about it, Marlene. I mean, give me a break! Besides the occasional old times' sake fuck with Karen, there was only those three, I swear on my mother's head."

  "The occasional what?"

  "You know, weekends, the kids? I go over the house, pick up Patsy and Jerry, I bring them back, and usually Karen cooks up something. I bring over a little meat, veal, sweetbreads, shanks, what's good that day. You remember Karen with the food, she's Martha fucking Stewart, Betty Crocker, whatever. So we sit around the table, eat, do a bottle of wine, get a little lit up, to tell the truth. It's civilized, you know? I figured it was good for the kids. Anyway, so we tuck them in, and then, what the fuck, you know, in the eyes of the Church we're still man and wife, so…"

  "So you had sex with your wife."

  "Yeah, what is that, a federal crime?"

  "No, but I guarantee you that's the source of the semen sample. Jesus, Paulie, talk about dumb!"

  But his head is shaking, lock to lock. "Uh-huh, no, no way, uhuh…"

  "Face it, Paulie-"

  "No, and here's why: Even if she wanted to shaft me, how the fuck is she gonna support herself, dress, feed the kids, unless I'm there cutting and selling meat six days a week? She makes shit at that little gallery job she got. It's just not in her interest to see me making license plates upstate."

  "Unless Hiram Fong pays her two point two million for your building."

  "Where the fuck did you get that?"

  "From my own little girl, who got it from the lips of a Cantonese person who shall remain nameless, but who works for one of Fong's business rivals. Everyone seems to know that Fong is assembling a big block of property around your street. The smart money says it's new housing for the huddled masses of Asia. He's been making out like a bandit since downtown business collapsed after Nine Eleven. Anyway, you don't want to sell, but if you're in the slams and you can't pay child support and she goes to court on it, you won't have a choice. Unless you think that Slow Joe and your mom can run the place without you."

  "Nah, no way." He dismisses the notion with a wave of his hand, takes a deeper drink of wine. "I can't fucking believe this. So what's the story with this girl? She's got to be in it, too. Somebody got to her?"

  "For sure. It turns out that Hiram is mobbed up in his own Chinese way, so it was either money or muscle, maybe both. Okay," here she claps her hands once, sharply. "Now that we know where to look, I've got a better chance of unraveling this. Paulie, don't look so glum, this is good for us."

  "Yeah, right. Christ, the mother of my children! And for what? So she can stand around in black clothes and drink shitty wine with a lot of phony baloneys? I ought to break her neck."

  "I don't want to hear talk like that, Paulie. We're going to put her in jail, you'll have to be satisfied with that."

  "Jail? She could go to jail? Jeez, that'd be awful! What'll I tell the kids?"

  She rolls her eyes to the tin ceiling, pats his hand, slips from the booth, thinks, Husbands!

  She says, "Paulie, I'll be in touch. And keep your mouth shut about any of this. We don't want to tip off the bad guys."

  Dully: "Yeah, uh-huh."

  "I mean it, man! Especially Karen."

  15

  THAT FRIDAY, RANEY TOOK THE 9:00 A.M. U.S. AIR FLIGHT from La Guardia to Syracuse and by 11:00 he was in a rented Taurus with the AC on high, driving through the seared fields of central New York State toward Auburn Prison. In his eighteen years on the job, Raney had been to several state prisons, and when he arrived he found this one a typical maximum-security joint, ugly, noisy, stinking of that characteristically nasty male primate-and-disinfectant smell you got only in monkey houses and men's prisons. As always, Raney wondered how, having once been in a place like this, any sane human being could ever contemplate doing anything that would have even the tiniest chance of bringing him back to one. Yet he knew that something like two thirds of the people here had been in the slams before, and often many times before. The criminal mind: a deep mystery.

  They took his gun and sent him to the admin block, where he sat in the cheaply paneled but heavily air-conditioned office of Ewell V. Molson, the deputy warden for administration. Molson struck Raney as the sort of geek who might conceivably have written on an application once that he wanted to go into corrections because he was good with people. He regarded Raney and the world through small black eyes, like coffee beans, and wanted more small talk than Raney did. After this was clearly exhausted, he tapped a thick file on his desk. "This Felix Tighe. Not one of our big successes. Didn't adjust, a bunch of disciplinaries. Poor impulse control- hell, not unusual here- resistance to authority, a fighter…"

  "I'm not thinking about hiring him," Raney could not resist saying.

  Molson decided that this was a joke and curved his thin mouth up at the corners for a half second. "No. Anyway, he got shanked in a fight, a little race riot in the yard. He was an Aryan Nation kind of guy. Killed a guard in that fight, too."

  "Really? I didn't know that."

  "Well, we didn't exactly call the networks, and since he died right after, we kind of let it slide. According to our medical records, the stab wound became infected, he went into septic shock, and passed away." He paused. "I shouldn't say this, but small loss to the world. Anyway, to get back to the reason for your visit, there's no doubt that he's dead. He was autopsied and cremated right here in Auburn."

  "Cremated? I thought his body was shipped to his cousin in New York."

  "Nope. According to these records, a container of ashes was shipped."

  "Can I have a copy of that file?"

  Warden Molson was accommodating as to copies. He was similarly accommodating in setting up interviews with the staff of the infirmary. Shortly, therefore, Raney found himself in a cramped office that stank of rubbing alcohol and iodine, talking to a cadaverous man who was apparently the medical director of the institution. This interview took a while, because Dr. McMartin spoke very slowly, and sometimes lost the drift of what he was saying. Raney believed the man was a stone junkie, like ten percent of American physicians, but blowing the whistle on the creep was not any part of his business. McMartin confirmed the official version- stabbing, infection, failure to respond to the antibiotics, septicemia, death. He had signed off on the autopsy.

  "You didn't do it yours
elf, Doctor?"

  "No, I meant I supervised, ah, supervised the autopsy as per… protocol, of course. But, ah, I was assisted by… my assistant there."

  "Named?"

  "Outside, down the hall." A languid wave of the hand. "I'm afraid I have a lot to do, seeing patients, so if that's all…"

  Raney thanked the man and went down the hall from the medical director's office. There, in a wide space in the corridor he found a tiny cubbyhole with a young man in it. This person, lard-colored, crop-headed, pimply and tattooed, had a short-sleeved set of green scrubs on, with a nametag that read T. AMES, and a frightened look in his wet blue eyes.

  Ames was obviously expecting him. He also confirmed the official report. The information that Felix's body had been shipped to New York was clearly wrong. Where did the detective hear that? Someone called the prison on the phone? That explained it. The copies of the records sent to the front office often had mistakes. The filing was done by prisoners, and they didn't really much care where they stuck the forms. Nope, Felix had died, Ames had watched him die, had arranged for the cremation, and sent the ashes parcel post to, let's see here, a Mr. Bruce Newton, in New York City…

  Raney knew the man was lying but had no way to nail him with it just then. He wasn't even a cop up here. His eyes had wandered while Ames went through his routine and had been seized by the contents of a bookshelf raised above Ames's tiny desk. There were some medical and first-aid books, a Physician's Desk Reference, some thick manuals for medical equipment, a prison regulation handbook, and some other volumes.

  "You a reader, Ames?" Raney asked, standing to peer at the titles of these.

  Ames followed his eyes to the shelf. "Sure. I got a lot of time on my hands." A false, scared smile.

  "That's pretty high-toned stuff you got here. Fanon, Lenin, looks like some French guys- hey, there's even one in Arabic script. You read Arabic, too?"

  "No, that's something… ah, we had a Arab guy here a while ago, he must have left that."

  "Yeah? He still in the joint?"