Reversible Error

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Not yet. He’s in the building, though. He can’t get out, unless he can get past Mack. It never been done.”

  Fulton did not relax his grasp. “No. Listen. You heard the story. Look. He has an ankle gun.”

  Dugman said, “Sure, Loo. We gonna pat him down real good.”

  Fulton shook his head from side to side. He fixed Dugman with his one good eye, staring across to him the meaning his mouth could not express. “No. That’s not what I mean. He could draw on you. When you’re not looking. You understand?”

  Dugman nodded. He understood. Fulton’s grasp slipped away and he fell into an exhausted unconsciousness. Dugman got up and yelled at the top of his voice, “Hey, Maus!”

  An answering shout came from above. Dug-man walked over to a glassless window and stuck his head out. “Maus,” he shouted. “Window, north side.”

  In the gathering dusk, Dugman could just make out Maus’s white face sticking out of a window on the third floor. “You see anybody up there?” he called.

  “No. Willis passed through a while back. He came up to take a piss. They been using the top floor as a latrine. It’s pretty disgusting, but what the fuck, they’re criminals, right?”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I braced him and he took some shots. I shot him back a couple.”

  “He dead?”

  “Well, I can’t say, since I’m not a licensed physician. But he took a full pattern high and low. There’s hair on the ceiling. Do you want me to try mouth-to-mouth?”

  “I want you to clear the building. We got to get a bus for the Loo real fast. Mack carried him down. Manning must’ve skipped.”

  “OK, I’m coming down,” called Maus. Dugman heard the sound of steps and a slamming door, and then the pounding of feet on iron treads.

  He turned and walked heavily toward the stairway. He opened the door and let it slam shut. The sound reverberated through the empty building. Dugman walked silently back into the room, carefully avoiding the crunchy fragments of plaster that littered the floor. He crouched down behind the bar and waited.

  After about five minutes he heard furtive steps, and Manning appeared in the dusty glass of the mirror, moving cautiously in short rushes, bent nearly double, with a pistol held out two-handed in front of him. Dugman waited until Manning’s back showed in the mirror and then he rose smoothly to his feet and said, “Drop the gun, Manning.”

  Manning dropped the gun immediately and turned slowly around to face Dugman, who held the Spanish automatic on him steadily.

  Manning smiled and said, “Tricky, ain’t you? I must be losing my touch.”

  “I’d say so,” said Dugman. “OK, turn around and hands on the wall. You know the drill.”

  Manning faced the wall with his hands against it and his legs spread wide apart. Dugman gave him a perfunctory pat-down, relieving him of his handcuffs. He backed away and Manning turned around.

  Manning said, “You was always pretty smart, Dugman. I heard you was quite the man in the old days. Lots of sugar around in Harlem for a cop in the old days.”

  “Do tell,” said Dugman.

  “But let me tell you, my man, it ain’t nothing to what they got now. I’m talking millions. Millions of dollars. Would you like to have a million dollars?” Manning was speaking rapidly, and Dugman could see a film of sweat speckled with gray plaster dust across his forehead.

  “I sure would,” said Dugman.

  “It could be arranged,” said Manning.

  “I’d have to take care of my people.”

  “That’s no problem,” said Manning. “I got people who owe me. Millions ain’t zip to them. You got no idea how much is involved. I’m not talking buying a hat, chickenshit police pads. This is serious money. Money for life. And it’s clean. It’s in accounts in the islands, man. You go down there and live like a fuckin king, and nobody can touch you.”

  “Keep on talking,” said Dugman. “You starting to get my attention.” His eye fell on Manning’s pistol where it had been dropped. Casually he turned away from Manning and walked slowly over to pick it up.

  As he expected, he heard the sudden movement, the snapping sound of metal leaving leather.

  He stood and turned, his pistol, already cocked, pointing straight out from his body. Manning’s ankle gun had cleared its holster and was rising, a blur of motion. Dugman shot him through the chest with the Spanish automatic. Manning fell backward into a sitting position and the little ankle gun went flying. His face had the stupid expression worn by the recently shot. Dugman took more careful aim and shot Manning twice more in the center of his chest.

  Karp arrived at the pier building just as the ambulances were taking away the last of the corpses. He picked out Dugman standing with a group of police officers and caught his eye. It was quite dark by now, and the night was lighted by the glow from the city, and from the Jersey shore, and by the white glare from a local TV crew, all of it laced with the colored scintillations from the various police and emergency vehicles.

  “How’s Clay?” was Karp’s first question.

  Dugman said, “He been chewed up some, but I guess he’ll live. He’s a tough son-of-a-bitch for a college boy. He’s in Bellevue.”

  “Who do we have?”

  “Nobody much,” answered Dugman. He pulled the stump of a cigar from his coat pocket and lit it. “Choo wasn’t using his regular people for this particular job. The two survivors were just a couple of mutts from Brooklyn. We questioned them but they don’t know shit. They didn’t even know Clay was a cop.”

  “I heard something about that questioning,” said Karp sourly. “I heard you cut off some kid’s prick, as a matter of fact.”

  Dugman laughed and coughed on the cigar smoke. “Yeah, we did. We threw it in the jar with the others. Want to see?”

  “I don’t want to know about it, Dugman. Willis got shot, I understand.”

  “Dead.”

  “Uh-huh. And Manning?”

  Dugman looked off toward the river and blew a long plume of Macanudo eastward. “Well … about that. I was on the line with the chief. Have you talked to him yet? No? Be a good idea. The thing of it is, Manning is on his way to the morgue with a John Doe tag—”

  “Christ! You killed Manning too?”

  “Well, let’s say he took a round in the lung and two more right through the pump from a big old nine belonged to one of the mutts. The circumstances are still under investigation and so on and so forth.”

  “Meaning you’re still working on your cock-and-bull story,” Karp snapped back. He gestured to the TV crew. “The press?”

  “Yeah,” said Dugman. “The police stumbled on a nest of felons while looking for fugitives. They opened fire, we returned. Four dead. Page twelve.”

  “You don’t think you can bury this completely?”

  “I try not to think at all,” said Dugman, “when the Chief of D. has got his nose up my crack. You got a problem with any of this, you need to talk to him.”

  “Yeah, I got a problem,” said Karp bitterly. “The problem is, the guy who engineered this whole fucking scene is gonna walk away from it smelling like a rose.”

  “You mean Mr. Lemon Coffee?”

  “That’s him,” said Karp. “And Fane. And Sergo. Although I have a feeling that Fane and Sergo are going to be harder to connect with the actual murders. Reedy’s the key player. He was there at the club. He must have tipped Manning about Clay being undercover as soon as he got it from … whoever he got it from. By the way, you did secure the plates and cups from the club?”

  “Yeah, after we talked, I sent some people over to collect the whole tray. You think it’ll be enough?”

  “Not nearly.”

  “So how you gonna bust him?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll think of something.”

  Dugman smiled crookedly. “Well. You might at that. If you do, and it’s OK with the chief, let me know. I’d like to bust a rich white dude one time. Make a nice change.”
r />   Two hours later, Karp, although he still hadn’t thought of something, was feeling considerably better. He was stretched out naked, facedown, on a throw rug, while Marlene walked up and down his spine, wiggling her toes. Marlene was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Albert Schweitzer on it, and nothing else.

  “Mm, that’s getting there,” said Marlene as she trudged. “You felt like Grand Street asphalt when I started. How do you feel?”

  “More,” said Karp with a deep sigh.

  Marlene knelt astride his back and began kneading his shoulder muscles. “God, you’re tense!” she exclaimed. “I’m surprised. You should be positively laid-back now that this drug-killing is solved.”

  “Not finished,” mumbled Karp into the rug.

  “It’s not? You got Clay back, didn’t you? By the way, I ran into Martha at the hospital. She was shaking with relief. I didn’t think Clay looked all that bad, though. I mean, considering he’s been tortured. So what’s the problem, anyway? If you have Manning … you do have Manning, right?”

  “Dead,” said Karp.

  “Oh, I see. That’s the problem.”

  She massaged him in silence for a few more minutes, then said, “It’s Reedy. You can’t get Reedy.”

  “Mmm-hm,” said Karp. He was trying not to think about Reedy, trying, in fact, not to think about anything but Marlene’s hands on his back and the thin bar of intense heat that was pressing against the small of his back where her groin touched it. He was also thinking about spinning around and pulling her down on him for a sweaty clinch on the floor, balancing this possibility against the delights of the continuing back rub.

  But Marlene abruptly stopped her rubbing, stood up, and sat on the bed. She pulled a Marlboro from a pack and lit it. Karp looked up at her. “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “No, except I’m starting to get tense myself. The fucking job.”

  “Leave it at the office,” said Karp.

  “Oh, yeah, look who’s talking! That’s my line. The problem is, I got one trial pending, which is Meissner, and about a hundred other cases, mostly rapes, which I should be preparing seriously, because with the new law we could win some of them, or at least muscle some good pleas, but I can’t because as soon as Meissner is finished I have to leave.

  “Also, there’s only a couple of other people in the bureau who know how to handle the new law, who understand how to develop cases. It’s a completely different situation. Ideally we should set up a structure, train new ADA’s, run programs to get the cops up to speed, contact the E-wards and the crisis centers—to pull it all together. Like you always say, the D.A. is the captain of the team. But in this case, there’s no captain, no team.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Karp asked. “I could talk to some of the zone commanders—”

  “No!” said Marlene vehemently. “That’s another thing that’s wrong. Look, don’t take this personally, because you’ve actually really been terrific all these years, and all, but …” She took a deep drag and let it out. “I can’t work for you anymore. The rules are right. I thought it through after we nailed Meissner. There’s enough tension in my life without adding the craziness of working for my husband.”

  She grinned at him. “Especially considering I’m a nervous wreck to begin with. Look at that fight we had about Meissner, all the nasty things I said about you and about the baby.”

  “You didn’t mean all that?”

  “Of course I didn’t mean all that. Look, it’s one thing to take me seriously; it’s another thing to take me seriously when I don’t want to be taken seriously. But that’s an example, and it comes from working for you. It would just screw up my working life and my personal life, not to mention the Little Stranger to be. So that’s it.”

  Karp felt a mix of satisfaction and disappointment; the disappointment was odd because he had wanted Marlene to quit, but he found that he did not like the thought of Marlene being whipped by anything. He said, “You could transfer to another bureau.”

  “Which one? Felony is Sullivan, one of Bloom’s empty suits. Can you see me working for Charlie Sullivan? I’d last three days. Rackets? Fraud? Narco? Possible, but they don’t sing to me. I want to do rape; rape needs doing, but I can’t figure out how to make it happen.” She laughed ruefully. “All those damn cases; it’s a shame we can’t work a Meissner on all of them. Your basic rapist doesn’t take calls when he’s on the job.”

  She put out her cigarette and crawled into bed and Karp followed her, and they had a close-knit and vaguely sad little bang, which blended imperceptibly into a deep and merciful unconsciousness.

  From which Karp awoke with the solution to all his problems glowing in his mind with crystalline perfection. He had come floating up out of an unremembered dream and there it was—perfect, legal, nasty, and decisive—tying up a hairy mass of loose ends. Oddly, his mind buzzed with the notion of reversible error. A legal concept, one of the pillars of the system: judges made mistakes, which were reversed by other judges. In the trial of life, the judge that banged his gavel irritably and without recess in a corner of Karp’s soul had found him guilty. He had misjudged Clay; he had misjudged Reedy. Your Honor, if it please the court, this particular set of errors is indeed reversible. Is it? You can remove the shame? The self-contempt? No, sir, but I can nail the bad guys. That was something.

  And he could. All that was required was the cooperation of the guilty.

  Karp’s first call that morning, once he was settled (and his staff commenting on how uncommonly cheerful he was looking) was to Denton. Denton was in a meeting of chiefs and commissioners and could not be disturbed. Karp said to the secretary, “Would you take a note in to him? It’s urgent. Say, ‘Butch says that if you want him to stay on the reservation on the Pier 87 thing, I need ten minutes of his time right away.’”

  The secretary was impressed and agreed to take the note in, promising to call back when she had an answer. Karp rang off and called the district attorney and made an appointment to see Bloom for five minutes one hour from now. The police-department secretary rang him back. “Denton says be here in fifteen minutes.”

  This was just enough time for Karp to walk at a quick pace out of the Criminal Courts Building, south on Baxter to One Police Plaza, check through security, and ride the elevator up to the fourteenth floor, where the departmental superchiefs had their offices. He announced himself to the receptionist, and shortly thereafter Denton walked into the room, in shirtsleeves, looking irritated. He jerked his head at Karp and led him into a small and unoccupied private office.

  “What is this, Butch? I’m up to my neck in budget.”

  “Sorry,” said Karp. “This won’t take long. I need your blessing, apparently, to go ahead with the prosecution of the ringleaders on the drug-lord killings.”

  “I thought we had an understanding on that,” said Denton, glowering.

  “We did, but obviously the situation has changed. Sweeping up some sick cop is one thing; covering up a massive conspiracy to use drug money to finance stock manipulation is something else entirely.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Manning and Amalfi were hired by Richard Reedy and Marcus Fane to wipe out the competition in the Harlem drug trade, to produce the cash they and some other people needed to get them out of a hole they were in on some stock deal. They also arranged for the kidnapping and torture of Clay Fulton. Fulton has a tape that ties Manning to the killings and he has a taped confirmation from Amalfi of the connection between Marcus Fane and the killings Amalfi and Manning did. We also have circumstantial evidence linking the flow of money from an offshore bank to a series of stock deals on the one side, and to drug money on the other. Reedy set up the bank. He was there in the Club Mecca the night after Clay got lifted, probably talking to Willis and Manning.”

  Denton listened to this impassively. “And what do you want from me?”

  “I think I’ve figured a way to tie Reedy to the dirty cops, but Manning and Amalfi�
��s part in the killings can’t be concealed.”

  “No way,” said Denton. “They’re dead. It’s finished.”

  “It’s not finished,” said Karp. “A bunch of Wall Street and political scumbags have raped the NYPD. They’ve corrupted officers; they’ve killed with total impunity; they’ve kidnapped and tortured a police lieutenant—”

  Denton was still shaking his head. “There’s a cap on it now. If we go forward—”

  “Bullshit, a cap!” cried Karp. “There’s no way you can keep this quiet now. Too many people know about it, from Willis’ people, to the cops who hauled the bodies away from the pier, to the docs taking care of Clay. You think they don’t know what torture looks like? What’s the cover story on that? Hey, Doc, I was on the job and I just happened to catch my prick and my nipples in an electrical outlet?

  “Not to mention the bad guys, all of them in businesses where every secret has a price tag. And the press is already starting to nose around. You’re figuring you can lay the drug-lord killings off on Willis, maybe Manning was working undercover too, got shot, poor bastard. Excuse me, but I still can’t believe that you and Clay Fulton were going to stand up and salute at an inspector’s funeral for Dick Manning.

  “Bill, what can I say? If I really thought you were a run-for-cover type of person, I wouldn’t even be here. I was willing to hang out there for you when this started, but …”

  Karp took a long slow breath and let it out. “I’m telling you, the time for that is way past. Nobody will believe the story, and to be absolutely frank, you’re too damn honest to be a credible liar under the kind of pressure you’re gonna have to face. Your only choice is how you want the story to come out.

  “And what’s the story? The business we discussed a while ago, the crazy-cop angle—that’s ancient history. It never happened. The truth that’ll come out is that the NYPD had a worm and they assigned the best they had to go after it, and it worked. The bad guys are dead. And look who’s really responsible for the mess—not cops: some greedy Wall Street and political sharks. When those names hit the papers, the cop connection will be four inches in the second section.”