Immoral Certainty

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  He discovered he had been picking nervously at a crack in the covering of the tan couch and stopped. There were no magazines to read. He went back to staring at the woman sitting on the edge of a desk across a narrow aisle. She was making call after call on the desk phone. She kept the receiver crooked against her shoulder and made an occasional note on a yellow pad, afterward shoving the pencil into the thick mass of lustrous black hair that, from Schick’s location, concealed her face from view. She was wearing a black skirt of some rustling material; it was slit and rode entrancingly up her thigh when she crossed her legs. The legs were marvelous, tapering without fragility, wrapped in shimmering mist-colored stockings. She wore a black kid glove on her left hand, like a gunfighter.

  Schick adjusted his position slightly, so as to improve his view of inner thigh for the next leg cross. But something must have lit up the invisible radar that is the secret possession of the girls; she snapped her head around and gave him the stare.

  He felt his jaw drop and a blush rising up his jaw. The woman was a classic cover-girl beauty—large black eyes over razor-sharp cheekbones, a wide lush mouth, the skin a delicate pink bisque. Schick took in that there was something wrong with one of her eyes, a crazy light in it, or perhaps it was slightly, but fetchingly, crossed. He felt the blush rising to his cheeks and pointedly looked away from her at the unmoving clock.

  Just then, the door to the bureau director’s office opened and Schick’s interview walked out. Schick was over six feet tall, but the bureau director rose nearly four inches higher than that. He extended a big hand and Schick took it. Schick looked him in the eyes, which were a strange deep gray with little yellow flecks. They slanted slightly above broad cheekbones. Karp’s nose was fleshy, his mouth full, his chin bold and knobby, his hair neatly cut, medium length, and ash-brown.

  “Mr. Karp?” Schick said.

  “Yeah. You’re Schick. Let’s go in my office.”

  The big man gestured toward the open door, and as he followed Schick he said something in a low voice to the dark-haired woman perched on the desk. She responded with a hearty guffaw. Karp stopped and said something else. Out of the corner of his eye Schick thought he saw the woman make a casual grab for the rear end of his prospective employer—if true, yet another sign that he was not on Wall Street.

  Schick entered the bureau chief’s office and looked around. In the center of the room a long scarred oak table was surrounded by a dozen or so miscellaneous chairs. At one end was a massive walnut desk, with a battered brown leather chair behind it and two straight chairs before. The desk was cluttered with a drift of russet case folders, assorted papers and yellow pads. Schick noticed his own résumé floating on top of the pile.

  There was a coat stand in the corner, from which hung a navy-blue suit jacket, a set of sweat clothes, a N.Y. Yankees hat, and a first baseman’s mitt. On the wall behind the desk hung some framed photographs: one of a softball team (Karp in the third row), one, cut from an old newspaper, of a much younger Karp shooting a basketball through the arms of an opposing player (caption: “Karp Scores 26 Against UCLA”), a photocopy of a news photograph showing some horsemen in white uniforms charging with lances, and what looked like a “wanted” poster printed in a foreign language. Schick was just leaning over the desk to inspect this last more closely when the door swung open and Karp came in.

  Karp threw his long, narrow frame down on the chair behind his desk and motioned Schick to sit across from him. He glanced at the résumé for a moment and then looked directly at Schick.

  “So. How come you want to work for the D.A.?”

  Schick smiled nervously, thought of an idealistic answer, looked at Karp, who was not smiling, rejected the idealistic answer, which was in any case not true, decided to blurt it out, and said, “I want to try cases. I can’t afford to set up my own practice, and if I work for a big firm, I won’t get to stand up in front of a jury for years. So . . .”

  Karp’s mouth twitched in what might have been the shadow of a grin. Schick noticed again that his eyes had little yellow flecks in them, and were set in his broad face at an almost angle. Not a companionable face. Schick could not help contrasting Karp with the senior lawyers with whom he had interviewed that morning. They had been smooth, confident men, strong, but with their strength buoyed by the power of a deeply established order, symbolized by polished wood and thick carpets. Karp’s strength seemed to be an interior toughness, owing little to the tacky office or whatever status he happened to have at the moment.

  Karp said, “OK, so you want to use the D.A.’s office for a little legal practice before you go out and get rich.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Yeah, but it’s not unusual. We don’t get many career people here. In fact, it’s a seller’s market right now. A lot of the bureaus will take anybody who isn’t actually drooling.” He looked down again at Schick’s resumed “Good grades. Law review at NYU. Very impressive. You’re a friend of Tony Harris, right?”

  “Yeah, we grew up together. He’s a little older than me, more my brother’s friend, but the same crowd and all.”

  “He recommends you. He says you can hit.”

  “Excuse me . . . ?”

  “Hit. As in baseball. You did play varsity ball at Pitt?”

  Schick nodded, confused.

  “So I got a hole at third base I could use you in. You look puzzled. Here’s the deal. We have a team, the Bullets, in the city rec league. We play law firms, the sanitation guys, the cops; it’s a big thing around here. When Mr. Garrahy was the D.A., he used to come to every game. We try to keep it alive, and we win a lot, which is more than you can say for what happens in court. What do you think of that?”

  “You hire lawyers because they play ball?”

  “Of course. If possible. This is jock country, Schick. If we had a guy in a wheelchair, I’d expect him to want to come out and cheer. I need people who are competitive and aggressive and can keep coming back and playing even if they get beat every day. Which is not unusual, by the way. You get the picture?”

  “Yeah. Sounds OK by me.”

  “OK. Let me tell you something about the job. The Criminal Courts Bureau was set up to deal with minor crimes, and that’s still most of the work, but a lot of the crimes we tend to deal with are technically felonies. When Criminal Courts was set up, in the old days, cops had time for a lot more of the petty shit. Now they don’t, unless the individual is making a particular pain in the ass of himself. Selling blowjobs in a car at night is one thing; if you try it in the skating rink at Rockefeller Center in broad daylight, they’ll bring you in.

  “So most of what we do is workaday small crime: purse snatches, pross, pickpocket, larceny, assault, some sex crimes, drunk driving. All the Fun City stuff. Felony Bureau gets the heavy crime, the armed robbery, arson, safe and loft ripoffs, hijacking. About ninety-eight percent of our work is stoking the system. New York County racks up around 130,000 felony and misdemeanor charges every year. Only about one out of a hundred felony charges in New York actually makes it to trial, and it takes an average of fifteen court appearances of one kind or another to clear a single felony case. So what do we do?”

  Schick realized that this was not a rhetorical question, that Karp expected a response. He cleared his throat. “I don’t know—I guess the cases back up.”

  “Of course, but only to a point. Speedy trial rulings mean we got to run the cases through at a certain rate whatever, or else some people are going to walk, and you never can tell who. It’s never the guy who kicked his landlord in the ass, it’s some mutt who killed six people. Big scandal.

  “No, what we do is plea-bargain. The defendant’s lawyer cops him to a lesser plea. Burglary goes to trespass, attempted homicide goes to simple assault, and so on. The mutt’s been sitting in jail a couple of months, he gets out with time served. Case closed. It sucks, but what can you do?”

  Karp paused and fixed Schick with a fierce stare. “But there’s a right way a
nd a wrong way to run the game. The first rule is to keep respect. You got to have the trial slots, so that if the defense holds out for some outrageous deal, you can spit in their eye and go to trial. Which means you have to prep cases like you were going to try them, and then not be afraid of going to court if you have to. And the second rule is: nobody gets away with murder.”

  “Murder? But I thought you said, um . . .”

  “Yeah, minor crimes. Well, it turns out we do a lot of work on murders too. And some rape when there’s violence attached. Not the easy ones, either. The reason for that is me.” Karp caught the inquiring look and held up his hand. “A long story,” he continued, “which somebody will convey to you if you’re interested. The main point here is that our current D.A., Mr. Bloom, and I don’t particularly agree about how the office should be run. Not to get into details, but Mr. Bloom, he basically doesn’t like trials. He’s not a trial lawyer himself and he doesn’t understand how trial lawyers operate. What he understands are committees and deals.

  “He wants the machine to run smoothly—that’s his main thing. So we drag these mutts into the building, wave some hands, run them through a courtroom, and cop them out. A murder trial is like sand in the gears. A lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of publicity, and—you could lose. Bad publicity, questions of competence are raised, people start to remember that the point of a prosecutor’s office is to prosecute, so how come Bloom is fucking up? Impossible! Much better to avoid it all and plead the goddamn killer to second-degree manslaughter. A year in the slams and another case closed.”

  As Karp spoke on this subject, his face darkened with angry blood, his heavy brow bunched, and little sparks seemed to flicker around his strange eyes. Schick unconsciously hunched a little in his seat. His thought was that he never wanted to be on the receiving end of that kind of anger.

  Karp seemed to catch himself then. He sat back and grinned and shook his head ruefully. “I’m on my toot again. I was talking about our work. Yeah, we do murder trials. There used to be a Homicide Bureau, but there isn’t anymore. What I try to do here is to do what the old Homicide Bureau did really well, which is to train lawyers to try cases, eventually to try homicide cases.

  “So if you want to learn that, this is the best place to be. The down side is, if you work for me, you will not have a happy time with the powers upstairs. You will have the shiftiest little office, you will have the slowest promotions, and if you ever need an administrative favor, you’ll hang by your eyelids before you get it. Sound good?”

  “Who could ask for anything more?”

  “Good. Any questions about the job?”

  “A million, but nothing urgent. Anything else you want to know about me?”

  “Yeah,” said Karp. His smile melted back into the rock of his face and his jaw set hard. “How come you were staring up my girlfriend’s dress out there?”

  Schick goggled and felt the red rise up his throat. “I … didn’t … um …” he stammered.

  “Schick,” said Karp in a gentler tone, “if you get red when you lie, you’ll never make a trial lawyer. Work on it! Meanwhile …”

  There was a sharp series of raps on the office door. Karp looked annoyed at the interruption, but said, “Yeah? Who is it?”

  The door opened and a stocky mustached black man in a sharp tan chalk-stripe suit came in. Karp’s face lit up. “Clay Fulton! What’s happening, baby!”

  The man noticed Schick. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “No,” said Karp, “we’re just finishing up. This is Peter Schick, our new third base. Peter, Detective Lieutenant Clay Fulton.”

  After mutual handshaking, Karp said, “OK, Schick, go out there and see the bureau secretary—Connie Trask, the good-looking black lady on the center desk—and tell her you’re hired. Tell her I said she was a good-looking black lady too. She’ll give you a pencil and a yellow pad and somewhere to sit. You might even get paid eventually. And go find Tony Harris. He’ll give you some stuff to do.” Thus dismissed, Schick mumbled good-byes and nice-meeting-yous and left the office. It was only later that he realized that Karp had never considered that the offered job would be refused. In an odd way, Schick took that as a compliment.

  When Schick had left, Fulton gestured toward the closing door. “What is he, twelve?”

  Karp laughed. “God, it looks that way. But that’s a law-school graduate. We’re getting old, friend.”

  “Older but still tough. Speaking of old, I got your invitation.”

  “You’ll come … ?”

  “Yeah, me’n Martha’ll be there. I can’t believe it, you and Marlene, the end of an era. I saw her outside just now, still a fox … still a dirty mouth. You gonna make her stop cursing that way when you got her legal? Slap her upside the head?”

  Karp whooped. “It would be my last act on earth. But let me say this, Clay: if she ever does kill me, I want you to catch the squeal. Might as well keep it in the family.”

  The two men talked easily for the next few minutes, the man-trivia of sports and politics. They were friends from Karp’s earliest time with the D.A.’s office, when he had been the most junior member of the fabled Homicide Bureau, and Fulton, already the owner of a glowing reputation as a detective, had taken him under his wing, taught him police procedure, and provided the evidence and witnesses that enabled Karp to make his own reputation as a prosecutor.

  “So,” said Karp after a pause, “they still killing people in Harlem?”

  Fulton’s face grew serious. “Yeah, that’s what I need to talk with you about. Somebody aced Larue Clarry last night.”

  Karp searched his mind for the name and came up empty. Fulton saw the blank look and explained, “The dope dealer. Ran coke for the flashy set. Somebody killed him in his own car and left it under the FDR at 120th. Left the gun he done it with too.”

  “Any reason why we should especially mourn Mr. Clarry’s passing?”

  “No, unless you his momma. But look here. The last three months we had five major dope wholesalers knocked off in Harlem. Clarry’s number six. Listen to this.” He consulted a notebook. “April 2, Jimmie Williams, shot in the back of the head with a large-caliber pistol in a vacant apartment, Harlem. Nobody saw nothing. April 28, Togo McAllister opened the door to his apartment, Morningside Heights, and walked into a shotgun blast. Nobody saw nothing.

  “May 12, Sweets Martin, found in an alley, Lower East Side, hands tied, throat cut, puncture wounds all over him, ditto. May 16, Bowman ‘Heat’ Fletcher, shot in the heart with a large-caliber pistol, also in his apartment, Upper West Side, also ditto. June 3, Ollie Bender, found in a construction site, Eighth and 43rd, with his head bashed in: fucking ditto.”

  Fulton put his notebook away and looked at Karp. “Anything strike you as odd about that set?”

  Karp thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t see any pattern, except that there isn’t any pattern. It just looks like a bunch of guys in a tough business got taken out in a short period of time. Their number was up. I mean, what’s the average life span of a dope dealer? Three, five years? Or do you see something I don’t?”

  Fulton grimaced, a comical wrinkling of his heavy brow and broad nose, as if he smelled rottenness, and began pacing to and fro in front of Karp’s desk. “I don’t know what I see yet. Like you say, it looks like a normal couple of months in the dope scene. Maybe that’s what’s bothering me: it’s too normal, too—I don’t know—miscellaneous. Like somebody was painting a picture for the cops that’s saying, ‘Ain’t nobody doin nothin special down here, boss!’”

  “Like in Sherlock Holmes,” Karp put in, “the unusual incident was that the dog didn’t bark in the night.”

  “Yeah, like that! And look here: six different M.O.’s, in four different detective zones, and not a single witness in any of them worth a damn. Like somebody was designing the set so that it wouldn’t be seen as a set, somebody who knows how cops think.”

  “Who benefits?” asked Karp abruptly.<
br />
  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you say ‘somebody,’ implying that there’s a single agent responsible for all six crimes. Assuming you’re right, and that you’ve got no good leads, why don’t you start with whoever you think might want to have all six of these guys killed?”

  Fulton shook his head. “Yeah, I thought of that. It could be any of a dozen, twenty people, guys who could move in on the business with the dead dealers out of the way. That’s in the city. God knows about out-of-town gangs, Colombians, Cubans, Jamaicans … where to start?”

  “So you’re stumped?”

  “Yeah, and I can’t stand it. God damn, I hate a mystery! Some slick fucker going around getting off on spitting in my eye. I ain’t whipped yet, but I need help. That’s why I’m downtown. If I’m not crazy, the only chance we got is on this Clarry hit. It’s fresh and the guy made his first mistake.”

  Karp made an inquiring sound, and Fulton went on. “He left his gun on the seat of the car. It’s a cheap piece of shit, a twenty-two, but it’s something.”

  “Prints?”

  Fulton snorted. “Not that good, but we got a serial number. Something could turn up. I want to squeeze the street hard on this. I’m gonna put the King Cole Trio on it, full-time.”

  Karp grinned and raised his hands in mock horror. “Uh-oh. Are they gonna be good, or am I gonna have ‘police brutality’ all over my cases?”

  “Come on, Butch, these are changed men. They’ve seen the light. They’re gonna treat every skell in Harlem like their momma. The thing of it is, I need to run everything that anybody finds out on all the investigations of all these killings through me. If there’s a pattern, that’s the only way to find it.”