No Lesser Plea

by Robert Tanenbaum

  In fact, Louis was quite well-off at this point. For nearly a decade he had been taking in thirty to fifty thousand dollars a year, tax-free, naturally, and without thinking about it very much had stashed it in gold collectors’ coins. A quantity of these now sat in the safe deposit vault of a downtown bank. He would have liked to play the go-go market along with everybody else, but wisely decided that his source of income could not bear the scrutiny that a complicated tax return would entail.

  But like most men of action, Louis was short on self-knowledge. He increasingly saw himself as an executive, although he utterly lacked the premiere quality of a good executive, which is the ability to choose and inspire good subordinates. Nobody really existed for Mandeville Louis except Mandeville Louis. The rest of humanity was a sort of animated Kleenex, to be used when needed and then thrown away. This was no problem as long as he remained a lone-wolf robber, but it was inevitable that, when he decided to obtain a true accomplice, his choice would fall on someone like Preston Elvis, who was a jackass.

  Louis put down his magazine, yawned, arose, stretched, and consulted his gold Rolex, the kind all the corporate gunslingers wore. It was 2:30. DeVonne was due back from the beauty parlor at 4:00. He had time for some work. Louis had a legitimate job, which he felt he needed as a cover for the straight aspects of his life—his car, his apartment, and so on. He worked as a freelance proofreader for the Claremont Press, a Harlem weekly newspaper and book publisher in the black liberationist vanguard. Louis rather enjoyed mingling with the sincere young people on the paper, although he was, of course, quite indifferent to black political aspirations, radical or otherwise. He enjoyed it because he liked pulling the wool over peoples’ eyes; it was another version of pissing on the altar. When the talk ran to revolutionary action and trashing the system, Louis always cautioned against violence, for which reason he was considered something of a Tom.

  In his real career, Louis was perfectly oblivious to racial issues. Most of the people he had robbed and killed were white, while all of the people he had killed to cover his tracks were—naturally—black and as close to Louis himself in physical appearance as possible, since there was always the chance of an unexpected witness. He was an equal opportunity murderer.

  As Louis sat down at his desk to check galley proofs, this career, and the whole elaborate structure of deception that supported it, came to an abrupt end. The phone rang. Louis picked it up and when he heard and recognized the voice on the line a jolt of pure terror ran through his body. His brow broke out in sweat and his mouth dried up so that he could barely speak.

  “Stack? Hey, Stack, you still there?”

  “Ahhh … ckk … S … Snowball? Snowball, what you doin’?”

  “What I’m doin’ is I’m in deep shit. Nobody show at that goddam hotel so I come home. Now there’s cops swarmin’ all around the front yard. What I spose to tell ’em?”

  “Be cool, Donald. You don’t tell em nothin’, hear? I take care of you.”

  “But Stack …”

  “Just keep yo lip buttoned, everything gonna be all right.”

  Louis heard a pounding noise in the background over the phone.

  “Stack, they’s beatin’ on the door. I gotta go open up or they gonna bust it down.”

  “Donald? Goddamn, Donald, hear me now! I’m talkin’ bout yo family now, you hear!”

  Louis shouted this into the mouthpiece, but his ear told him that the line had gone dead. He drew a deep breath and struggled for control. He cursed himself for his mistakes. Elvis had screwed up, that was obvious; and Walker had possessed a home to go to, which had broken the pattern of perfect junkie dependence that was at the heart of Louis’s strategy.

  He got up and went to his closet. No point in sticking around here. The cops would crack Donald Walker in about four minutes flat. Donald still had his phone number, which meant they could trace it to his Amsterdam Avenue apartment. As he dressed, he was already planning his next setup. First of all, Elvis would have to go. That whole move was a mistake. Then, no more phone numbers. He’d have to work out some other system of keeping junkies on ice until he was ready to zap them. In any case, he had plenty of resources. It was time to get out of town for a while; he could get in touch with DeVonne, leave her to watch the place. The cops would soon give up looking for someone who wasn’t there. They had plenty else to do.

  By the time he was dressed in slacks, a light sweater, and a raincoat he felt calm again. He pulled his attaché case from under the bed and flipped it open. He took out all the cash and stuffed it in his wallet, then threw a change of clothes on top of the shotgun and the pistol. The pistol! HOLY SHIT! Louis ground his teeth and trembled in a paroxysm of self-contempt. He’d forgotten to ditch the pistol that tied him to the liquor store killings. Damn! He should have given it to Elvis and then wasted the asshole. But who could have figured that Elvis would fuck it all up like this? Weirdly, one of his mother’s sayings passed through his mind: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

  He shook his head. I’m going batshit, he thought. He closed the attaché case and made for the front door. He decided to go down the fire stairs and ditch the gun in the trash can out back. He went out the door and slammed it behind him.

  He turned right toward the fire stairs. A white man in a plaid jacket was leaning against the fire door. Before Louis could register what this meant, a voice behind him said, “Don’t move.” He snapped his head around and looked into the barrel of Sonny Dunbar’s revolver, pointed at his head, three feet away. Then, as he stood frozen, the white man was by his side, he was pushed against the wall, his attaché case was taken, and he was thoroughly frisked. His hands were cuffed behind his back. Dunbar told him he had a warrant for his arrest for murder and read him his rights. He took his right to remain silent seriously. The two detectives got not a single word out of him during the long ride downtown.

  Nor did Karp do any better. He was still jazzed up from the excitement of the last hour: the ride to the precinct and the operation of his plan to catch Louis without violence, the positioning of the two detectives by radio, Walker’s phone call, and the successful capture of the desperado. His first sight of Mandeville Louis had been a letdown. It was difficult to believe that this calm, slight, almost scholarly looking man could be a cold-blooded murderer. The thought flashed through Karp’s mind that a mistake was being made—but then he recalled the guns in the attaché case. The pistol was already on its way to police ballistics to be test-fired.

  After Louis had been booked and fingerprinted at Midtown South, and after Walker had identified him as Stack, Karp had him brought to an interrogation room. Karp found the man disturbing, his preternatural calm, something almost reptilian about the way he sat erect in his chair, hands folded on the table, as if waiting for a rabbit to emerge from a hole.

  Karp introduced himself, Dunbar, and the stenographer for the record and said, “Mister Louis, I want to ask you some questions concerning the shooting deaths of Angelo Marchione and Randolph Marchione at A&A Liquors, located at Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, which took place on the night of March Twenty-sixth, Nineteen-seventy, between 10:30 and 11:00 P.M. Before I ask you any questions, I want to advise you of your rights. You have the right to remain silent and to refuse to answer any of my questions. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And anything you do or say can and will be used against you in court. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have a right to consult a lawyer now, before any questioning, and to have a lawyer present during any subsequent questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided free of charge. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. Now, do you wish to make a voluntary statement concerning the shooting deaths I have described?”

  “No, I do not. I wish to remain silent and I wish to consult a lawyer at this time.”

  And
that was that. Any information obtained through questioning after such a statement would be tainted. Karp knew it, and obviously Louis knew that Karp knew it. He gave Karp a little smile. Karp tightened his jaw and called the prisoner duty officer to take Louis back to one of the precinct cells.

  But after some reflection, Karp felt he had done pretty well. With Walker as a prosecution witness, and if the gun checked out, he felt he had a tight enough case. There was also the chance that Mrs. Kolka had gotten a good enough look at Louis to pick him out of a lineup. As Karp gathered his papers and prepared to return to Centre Street to write up the case, he began to feel happy—champagne-silly happy. He thought, I caught a killer!

  But Karp was not the happiest person concerned with this particular case. The happiest person was a prostitute named Violet Buttons. She had checked into Room 10 of the Olympia Hotel with a trick about ten minutes after Preston Elvis had left. As she entered the room her quick eyes spotted the blue plastic bank envelope on the shelf above the sink. In an instant it was buried in her oversized handbag. Twenty minutes later, in a booth in the ladies’ room of a cafeteria on Tenth Avenue, she inspected her prize. Cash! Jesus! And what was this? Smack? It couldn’t be! But it was. She looked at the bank envelope. Uh-oh, better get shut of this. She took a straight razor out of her bag, reduced the envelope to confetti in seconds, and flushed the pieces away.

  She got out her works and shot the stuff into a vein on the top of her foot. Goddamn, she thought, this is fine shit. And free, too. I have died and gone to heaven, she thought. And she was half right.

  Chapter 9

  Twenty of the best prosecuting attorneys in the Western world sat in Jack Conlin’s office for the Homicide Bureau’s weekly meeting. It was the next Monday. Karp had been working nonstop on the Marchione case in preparation for this weekly event.

  The meetings usually took place on Thursday, but somebody in the mayor’s office had scheduled a Bullets softball game with the Bronx DA’s office on the previous Thursday, in Yankee Stadium no less, which of course took precedence. The point of these meetings was to allow the assistant DAs to present their cases, and for the other assistant DAs, especially the half dozen or so senior ones, to tear them to shreds. This was done with acid wit and without pity.

  Karp sat in the rearmost of two rows of straight chairs that had been set up behind the leather banker’s chairs around Conlin’s big table. The senior guys sat around the table, with Conlin himself, looking now like a large pink shark, at the head. The man presenting the case would stand or sit by the door at the foot end of the table. This was where Karp would be in a few minutes and present the liquor store murder case, after the bureau got through with chewing up poor Terry Courtney.

  Karp was fibrillating with nervous energy. The room was overheated and he was sweating like a pig and hoping it wouldn’t show. Every few minutes, he casually wiped the heel of his hand across his face like a squeegee and wiped the collected sweat on his trousers. He thought, I can do this, the case is in my head, I did everything right, it’s OK to be nervous, this is just like before a game. Like a game, he thought, grimly, but I never played against Bill Russell.

  Courtney was a good lawyer who had come to the bureau six weeks ago from Felony Trial; this was only his second homicide case. He’d won his first and had gotten cocky. Now he was meat.

  Courtney felt as he imagined Angel Ramirez, the deceased in this particular case, must have felt, when the 4.3-inch blade wielded by his rival in love, Hector (Kid Benny) Benvenista sliced through his anterior abdominal musculature, inflicting a 2.1-inch perforating wound in the inferior vena cava, causing death by exsanguination and shock at approximately 11:30 P.M. on March 4, 1970 at 78 East 129th Street in New York County in the State of New York.

  Angel was dead. Kid Benny had killed him. Courtney knew it. The crowd of witnesses who had observed the deed knew it. God knew it. But Courtney could not prove it, in the eyes of the law—and what was vastly more important—to the satisfaction of his colleagues in the Homicide Bureau.

  Chuck Walsh and Sean Flaherty, who between them had nearly a half century in the bureau, were now taking turns exposing his incompetence.

  “Wait a minute!” said Walsh. “How many witnesses did you say there were?”

  “Ah … eight or ten.”

  “Eight or ten? Eight or ten! Which was it? Eight? Or ten? You sure it wasn’t fourteen and a half?”

  “No … ten. It was ten.”

  “And of these ten, how many did you depose?”

  “Um … three.”

  “Three? Good work! What happened to the other seven? Did they die?”

  “No, but ah … the three, the three that I got statements from, they ah, all agreed, and so I thought …”

  Flaherty broke in. “You thought! You thought you could cut corners, save yourself a little time, right? But you didn’t think, did you, that maybe those other seven people saw something different. That maybe the defense is going to march in with evidence from those other seven people, who happen all to be solid citizens, while your three people turn out to be—surprise, surprise—asshole buddies of the deceased from birth and sworn enemies of the accused. How about that?”

  Courtney opened his mouth to speak, or maybe to vomit, such was his expression, but neither words nor bile emerged. He had been caught being sloppy, the unforgivable sin in the Homicide Bureau. It was worse to be sloppy than to make a mistake. But Courtney, in his unthinking zeal, had also made a mistake.

  It now turned out that he had botched the most important part of his work: the interview with the accused. Karp noticed, as Courtney stumbled through the close of his presentation, a pronounced tightening of jaws and tapping of fingers around the big table. Flaherty puffed his pipe like a locomotive getting up steam for a mountain run, always a bad sign. At last he removed the pipe and slammed his hand down on the table.

  “You said what? What did you ask him?”

  “I, ah, asked him if the victim had a knife, too?”

  “And what did he answer, dear boy?”

  “He said yes.”

  Flaherty slammed his hand down again. “Jesus! What the hell did you expect him to say, you ninny? Don’t you realize you put the idea in his head and that you’ve established the possibility that he killed Ramirez in self-defense?”

  Flaherty threw up his hands in a gesture of disgust and Walsh took over. “Did you establish in the witness statements that the victim was unarmed? Did you at least do that?”

  Courtney shook his head, his mouth gaping in shock.

  “How about defensive wounds. Did you check with the M.E. report to see if there were any? Were there any wounds or evidence of a fight on the person of the accused?”

  Courtney looked from stony face to stony face around the table. Of course, he hadn’t done any of these things. He flapped his hands and made inarticulate noises. Nothing like this had happened to him in law school. His brain was numb. He began to think about how nice it would be to have a quiet real estate practice in Rahway.

  Walsh turned to Conlin. “Jack, this man is wasting our time. The case stinks.”

  Conlin nodded. “It does that. Courtney, this preparation is a disgrace to the bureau. More than that, you may have prevented us from trying a dangerous criminal for first degree murder. I’ll see you in my office after this meeting. Sit down. Karp, let’s hear from you next.”

  Courtney took his papers in shaking hands and went to a seat in the rearmost row. Karp replaced him at the foot of the table, and opened his notes. He looked out at the faces before him and met Joe Lerner’s dark gaze. It was blank and uncommunicative. Although Lerner was the closest thing to a mentor Karp had in the bureau, it was clear that he would not budge to help if Karp floundered.

  Karp cleared his throat and began. As he progressed, he became more confident and he did not falter even when the questions began. Chris Conover, Conlin’s head crony and the Homicide Bureau’s administrative chief, asked, “The two victims, do
we know who was killed first?”

  “Yes, we do. It was the older man, the store owner.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Angelo Marchione was killed with a shotgun at close range in a store full of bottles. There were bits of glass from those bottles and traces of his blood on his son’s shoes. I have copies of the police lab reports here.”

  “OK. Go on.”

  “The son was shot three times with a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Airweight, once in the abdomen and twice in the forehead. Any one of the shots would have been fatal.”

  “Did you check with the M.E.?”

  “Yes. I read the transcript and listened to the tape from both autopsies. They check. No problem.”

  Conover grunted and sat back, waving at Karp to continue.

  “The M.E. says he was shot in the abdomen first, at point-blank range. The slug went right through the victim and lodged in the wall of the store. Trajectory evidence, as well as deep embedded glass in the victim’s knees shows that he was most likely astride the killer when he was shot.”

  Karp then proceeded to elucidate the strands of evidence that linked Mandeville Louis to the crime. The police ballistics evidence that connected the gun found in Louis’s attaché case—after a duly warranted search—with the slugs that killed Randolph Marchione. His fingerprints on the very cartridge cases that had held the slugs dug out of the victim. The fragments of cloth in the victim’s fingernails, that matched the cloth in the suit jacket found—again after a duly warranted search—in Louis’s apartment. The fragments of glass, shown to be the same as the kind of glass shattered by the shotgun blast that shattered Angelo Marchione’s head, in the trouser cuffs of the same suit. The eyewitness testimony of Mrs. Kolka, who had picked Louis out of a lineup. The testimony of Donald Walker.

  When Karp had finished, Walsh said, “Very fancy, Karp. The Walker evidence is the key to the case, as I’m sure you’re aware. But tell me, did you promise Walker any leniency in his own case? Does he know about felony murder?”