No Lesser Plea

by Robert Tanenbaum

  And he knew exactly who it was, because he had just remembered why the guy who had opened the door downstairs looked so familiar. Karp had been looking at his Identikit portrait almost every day for three years.

  For a panicked moment Karp considered dialing 911. Then he realized that not only would the line be busy but that Elvis would hear him dialing. Karp placed the phone on the bed carefully, and slowly slid off, balancing on his good leg and clenching his teeth against the pain. The codeine was starting to work, but the knee still sent darts of fire up his leg. It was still completely useless as something to walk on.

  Karp thought of all the scene-of-the-crime pictures he had seen while at Homicide. Lots of macho hard-boiled laughs about those. He imagined himself in one of them. Not funny. He imagined his own body on an autopsy table. His heart thumped audibly against his chest. A few hours ago he had fancied himself ready to die, but now—with a killer in the next room—he found himself not wanting to die at all. Instead, he wanted to kill.

  The first thing to do was to get moving. Elvis was checking out the kitchen, and would be coming through the closed bedroom door in a few seconds. Karp didn’t think it was a good strategy to hide under the bed. In the movies, killers always looked under the bed. Karp looked under the bed anyway. It was still a bad idea. But one of the slats would do for a cane. He jimmied it out and rose wretchedly to his feet.

  He heard steps coming toward the bedroom door. An image from his childhood flashed into his mind. He had done something very bad, broke a lamp or something, and he was cowering in the bedroom listening to his mother searching the house for him. He was in for a serious spanking. He remembered what he had done then and he did it again. He hobbled over to the bathroom and locked himself in.

  Elvis heard the bathroom door close and the shower go on. He smiled. This was going to go down smooth as shit. Mostly everything had been going right since his phone call from Louis. He had written it all out, under Louis’s coaching, on the piece of brown paper bag that he kept in his wallet and consulted half a dozen times a day. No more forgetting stuff for Pres. He had made contact with the Claremont Press. He had talked all that political bullshit with Barlow and them, and got the names of brothers who were into trashing the system. They had been glad to send a tough kid who was ready for anything and obviously not a cop (they had checked, of course—people remembered him from Attica), to Chingo Ray, who could always use another mule. He’d picked up the bomb. He’d dropped it into a mail cart. He waited outside until he heard it go off. It had all worked out as Louis said it would.

  Except for the cop coming to see Vera. That wasn’t supposed to happen. OK, he could ditch that scene all right. Couple of clothes was all he had there. The bitch was getting too nosy anyway. There were plenty of people he could stay with. DeVonne, for example.

  Everything was fine—except for the chick getting wasted instead of Karp. Elvis had watched the small, bloodied form loaded into the ambulance at Foley Square, and had stamped his foot in rage; damn, he had marked the damn package “personal,” meaning Karp was supposed to open it himself. He had waited around for a while until he saw Karp, obviously unhurt, rush out of the building and hail a cab.

  Elvis had studied the brown paper again, but got no new advice. He definitely did not want to call Louis and tell him the bomb had gone off and Karp was still alive. He only wanted to call Louis and tell him Karp was dead, that was the only way the crazy motherfucker would get off his ass.

  So he had looked up Karp’s address in the phone book, taken the subway to the Village, and waited. He had his piece with him for the occasion, a real Smith & Wesson .38, nickel-plated, with the four-inch barrel, that he had bought off a guy in a bar for ninety bucks. Big time. No more Saturday Night Specials for old Pres.

  With this new toy in hand, Elvis flung open Karp’s bedroom door and whirled into the room, in the predatory crouch he had seen in so many TV shows. You never could tell, maybe the guy wasn’t in the shower yet. Maybe he had a gun, too.

  OK, nobody here. Check under the bed. In the closet. OK, all clear. Bathroom door locked. No problem. Elvis pulled out the piece of steel shim he had used to spring the front door lock, popped the latch, threw open the door, and burst into the bathroom.

  The bathroom was filled with steam. Elvis was inside a white cloud, lit by the light over the sink. He moved slowly over the steam-slick tile floor toward the sound of the shower. He was sweating heavily. Damn! Motherfucker liked hot showers. He cocked the pistol and pulled back the shower curtain. What the fuck … ? He peered into the tub. Visibility was about four inches, but it was enough to see that nobody was there.

  He heard a sound behind him and turned his head, startled.

  Karp hit him square in the face with the contents of his tin Statue of Liberty wastebasket, two gallons of water at 190 degrees, into which he had poured an almost-full bottle of Liquid Plumber. It was a pretty good trick considering Karp was balancing on one leg when he did it. Elvis shrieked and staggered backward, tripped over the tub, and fell in. He shrieked again when the boiling shower struck him and began firing his pistol reflexively. One bullet hit the ceiling. The next hit the mirror over the sink, shattering it and covering the floor with broken glass.

  Karp hopped over to the alcove behind the door where he had hidden, where he had parked his bed slat. He picked it up and started for the door. A bullet cracked over his head. The sound of the gunfire and Elvis’s continuous screams were deafening in the little room. Karp was on automatic now. The drugs and the noise and the fear pumping through him made rational thought impossible. With nightmare slowness, he lurched through the fog to the doorway.

  His bare foot landed on a sliver of glass and he cursed and staggered. Then his slat came down on a larger piece of glass and skidded away, and he fell.

  Karp was nauseous with pain, and confused. He thought he heard Elvis screaming and scrabbling in the tub behind him. But when he looked up, there was a black man coming through the fog with a pointed pistol. How did he get out and in front of him again? Karp writhed in the broken glass and tried to reverse direction, knowing it was too late. The pistol exploded. Karp thought. Now I’m dead.

  Karp actually enjoyed death. For one thing, he didn’t hurt anymore. And it was quiet. He thought, This is the silence of the tomb. That made him laugh. Other people were there, too. They turned and looked at him when he laughed. He felt embarrassed. There were dead people, like his mom and grandma, but also live people. There was Guma. There was a blond girl he had a crush on in Junior High. They were all standing around in Karp’s living room, which had been refurnished with white rugs and white modern furniture, white and chrome and glass. Marlene wasn’t there, though. He wanted to call out to her, but he didn’t want to be embarrassed again.

  All the people were gathered around the doorway to the bedroom. They made a place for him in front of it. There was some kind of black hanging blocking the doorway. It was really a sort of garment, with sleeves, pants legs, and a hood. Karp knew he was supposed to get into it, so he did. He leaned back and the garment yielded like elastic. He was almost horizontal, muffled in springy blackness. Somebody said, “Open your eyes.” It seemed like a good idea.

  “Holy shit! What a … what a … winger. Really ocean. A weird kind of blotter, hmm?” said Karp, through cottony lips.

  “A little disoriented, are we? Pentothal will do that. How do you feel, Mister Karp?” said a voice in a lilting West Indian accent.

  Karp was lying in a hospital bed. His left knee was in a heavy cast and his right wrist was in the hands of a brown young lady in a nurse’s uniform. She was taking his pulse.

  “Still a little vague. Where am I and what time is it?”

  “You are in a postoperative ward of Bellevue Hospital. In New York City. And it just gone eleven o’clock.”

  “At night? It can’t be.”

  She laughed. “In the morningtime, Mister Karp. You were in surgery for two hours and then you slept. And t
hat man who brought you here has been waiting outside since seven.”

  “The man? Could I see him?”

  “Yes, for a little bit. But don’t tire you, now.”

  She cranked up his bed so that he was sitting up and pulled back the curtains. Karp felt twinges of pain from his face. Bandages. When he raised his hands to feel them he noticed that his hands were also bandaged.

  The nurse ushered Sonny Dunbar into the room and left. Dunbar looked beat. His eyes were bloodshot and his pale yellow suit was wrinkled and dusty. He sat down on a straight chair near Karp’s bed and rubbed his face.

  “How you feeling, Butch?” he asked.

  “Better than you look, anyway. They’re working you too hard, or what?”

  “No, the usual.” After a pause, he continued. “I shot Elvis.”

  “You shot Elvis? Jesus Christ, Sonny, if you killed my witness …”

  “No, no, relax! He’s not dead. He’s down in the lock-up ward. He had surgery about the same time you did. There was nothing else I could do. You were on the floor, you looked like you were half dead, he was blazing away, screaming out of his mind, blind, the goddamn place, you couldn’t see shit anyway, so I shot him. In the arm, as it turned out, like in the movies. It’s only the third guy I ever shot. I’m still rocky behind it.”

  “Oh, that was you in my bathroom. I thought I was going crazy, and Elvis was in front of me. Or somehow Louis had gotten away and was going to finish the job. Christ, you probably saved my life. What a fucking day, huh?”

  “Yeah, Karp, you really know how to throw a party. By the way, Louis is here.”

  “What, in Bellevue?”

  “Yeah. I heard from Monahan in the Bellevue Psych Ward. Your boy is sort of a well-known figure among the guard staff. He bites, he screams, he pisses.”

  “Shit, I can’t believe it, the bastard! I’m not even cold in my grave and he’s trying to slide one by me. Hand me that phone, Sonny.”

  Karp had a couple of conversations, promised favors, and called in chips. In a few minutes he had made sure that Louis would not be able to get his hearing scheduled until Karp was ready for him. Slowing down the system was easy.

  “OK, Sonny, why don’t you find me a wheelchair and we’ll roll down to Elvis’s room. I want to talk to him as soon as he comes around.” Dunbar went out and was gone for half hour. When he returned, it was without a wheelchair and in the company of the West Indian nurse and a stocky man with large teeth and a white brush haircut, dressed in surgical greens.

  “Mister Karp, I’m Doctor Hudson. I just operated on your knee, and now Nurse Simms here tells me you want to screw up my work.”

  “Butch, I tried, but she wouldn’t let me have it,” said Dunbar.

  “It’s just for a few minutes, Doc. Just down the hall.”

  The doctor reached down and picked up a bedpan. “You see this? The reason we give you this so you can perform your bodily functions in the comfort of your bed is because we don’t want you to leave the bed. For any reason.”

  “But …”

  “No buts. Look, young man, if you ever want to dance Swan Lake again, you’ll stay put, flat on your back for at least a week. Your knee is stuck together with spit. It’s a marvel you were able to run fast enough to fall down. Worst damn job I ever saw. Where did you have it done, Taiwan?”

  “California.”

  Hudson snorted. “Same damn difference! All right, I’ll be back tomorrow, and I want to see cobwebs on that cast. Simms, if he moves, sit on his face!” Hudson flashed a large grimace and strode out of the room. Simms took charge again. Turning to Dunbar, she said, “All right, you, visitin’ hours is ov-ah.”

  “Simms, are you really going to sit on my face?” said Karp, after Dunbar had been hustled out of the room.

  “None of that naughty talk, you. Here, take this pill! I don’t want you to be achin’ and yellin’ up the night nurse.”

  “Kaplan! What’s going on?” said Karp on the phone. “You’re supposed to keep me in touch.” Karp had been cosseted and bullied alternately for a week by Simms and the other nurses, and by the ferocious Hudson. He had to admit that his knee felt better; the bandages were off his hands, feet and face. He was going crazy with boredom, and with worrying about Marlene suffering and about Louis somehow getting away.

  “Sorry, Butch, I’ve been running off my feet. All this stuff with Louis and Elvis is extracurricular, you know. I still got to hold the fort out there.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. So what’s the story? You talk to Elvis?”

  “Not exactly. His lawyer was there as soon as the docs would let him talk. But he didn’t talk. I mean stone wall.”

  “His lawyer? A Legal Aid?”

  “Bullshit, a Legal Aid. We’re talking Leonard Sussman.”

  “Oh, shit! Did you talk to him? What’s the deal?”

  “The deal is, one, Sussman’s fee is being paid by a benefactor who prefers to remain anonymous. Three guesses who. Two, the story is, Elvis came to you to tell you to lay off his dear girl friend, who was apparently threatened by one of your minions. You viciously attacked him with lye and boiling water, as a result of which he is blinded and disfigured. He drew his gun merely to defend himself against this unprovoked attack. Oh, yeah, he will plead to a concealed weapons charge. How about that shit?”

  “This is a fucking joke. What about the goddamn bomb!”

  “What bomb? Just because our man is, get this, ‘politically active,’ we are going to try to frame him for an act of terrorism. A scandal.”

  “But, the girl friend, Higgs, she told Sonny that she … oh, crap!”

  “Oh, crap is right. Vera is tight as a clam. Didn’t see nuffin’, didn’t write nuffin’, don’t know nuffin’. Except one thing. Preston Elvis was warm in the bosom of his little family on the night of March twenty-sixth, Nineteen-seventy. She remembers that, clear as a bell. Mandeville Louis? Never heard of him, either of them. We been struck out, Chief.”

  “Uh-uh, baby, we’re just getting started.”

  “What are you going to do, Butch?”

  “Damned if I know, now. I’ll think of something.”

  At ten o’clock that night, Karp cruised into the prison ward of Bellevue, showed his credentials to the guard, and rolled his wheelchair up to the bedside of Preston Elvis. Elvis’s head was swathed in bandages yellow with furacin and his right arm was in a cast. Karp sat silently, and after a while Elvis became aware that somebody was in the room.

  “Who … who there?” he said nervously.

  “Don’t worry, Pres, it’s not the hit man, yet. It’s just your latest victim.”

  “Who, Karp? What the fuck you doin’ here? Get outa my room!”

  “Come on, Pres, I’m just a fellow sufferer come to keep you company. Like a candy striper. Would you like something to read?”

  “Fuck you, muthafucka! You finished, man. I’m gonna sue your ass, what you did to me. I’m gonna sue every fuckin’ thing you got.”

  “Oh, yeah? Is Sussman going to do it for a contingency fee? Or is Mandeville Louis going to pay for that, too?”

  “Fuck off! I ain’t talkin’ to you. I don have to talk to you. My lawyer say …”

  “Shut up! I don’t give a rat’s ass what your lawyer says. I’m not here to ask you any questions because I already know what you did and how you did it. I don’t need anything from you, Pres. But you need something from me.”

  “Fuck I do!”

  “Yeah, you do, Pres. Lookie here. We got you on the weapons charge, and I think we could probably make simple assault stick. OK, needless to say, we go for the max, five years, and I’ll make sure you do straight time, if I have to use every chip and every bit of pull I got to my name. Think about it, Pres. Five in the joint, blind, no face, a fucked-up arm. But they won’t be looking at your face, Pres. They’ll be a lot more interested in the other end. They’ll be betting your tail in poker games, Pres. I raise you two smokes and you can fuck Elvis. After a couple years
you’ll be able to park a VW up your asshole.”

  “Shut up! Nurse! Get this bastard out of here!” Elvis yelled.

  “OK, Pres, I was just going. But here’s another thing to think about. Your good buddy, Louis. You think he’s about to let somebody who could finger him on a murder rap live in prison for five years? I mean, you know him better than most, right? Few cartons of cigarettes is all it would take up there. What do you think?”

  Elvis was cursing shrilly. Karp heard somebody coming in the hallway, and other people in the ward were yelling for quiet. He leaned closer to Elvis’s bed and spoke softly, with a terrible intensity.

  “I don’t want you, Elvis. You’re just a little piece of shit to me. But you give me him, him, and you’ll walk, free and clear, I swear it. I swear it. Free. And. Clear.”

  Karp did not go back to his room after this episode. Instead, he went to see Marlene, and begged the night nurse to let him spend a few minutes in her room. She was nearly as bandaged as Elvis. Only her mouth and a small patch of clear skin on the left side of her face remained uncovered. Her left hand was immobilized and suspended in a complicated frame attached to the bed. She appeared to be asleep. The room was full of flowers, from friends and relatives, and from Karp, who had ordered flowers sent every day since the bombing.

  He rolled into the room and watched her for some minutes. Then he began to speak, softly, and to weep, a long, snuffling monologue. He told her how miserable and ashamed he was, and how he would make it up to her if it took him his whole life. He enumerated all the things he could have done that might have prevented her from getting hurt. He said he wished it was him lying there, instead of her. Worst of all, he told her they had the man who planted the bomb and he would give that man his freedom if he would help put Mandeville Louis away, and that he, Karp, was the lowest worm in the universe and if Marlene never looked at him again it was only what he deserved. And more in the same line.