Immoral Certainty

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I can’t think about it right now. Harris told me, by the way, that we just passed eight hundred homicides this year, and it’s only June. We’re gonna set another record.”

  “Calls for a celebration.”

  Karp grinned and rubbed his face. “Yeah, how about a good meal, a hot bath, a back rub, and a terrific piece of ass?”

  Marlene twitched her eyebrows. “Sounds great! Why don’t you go out and get all that, and I’ll meet you back at my place for a hand of rummy.”

  Karp laughed. “Fuck you, Ciampi.”

  She twined her arm through his. “Actually,” she said, “you took the words right out of my mouth.”

  Buy Reversible Error Now!

  A BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT K. TANENBAUM

  Robert K. Tanenbaum is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five legal thrillers and has an accomplished legal career of his own. Before his first book was published, Tanenbaum had already been the Bureau Chief of the Criminal Courts, had run the Homicide Bureau, and had been in charge of the training program for the legal staff for the New York County District Attorney’s Office. He also served as Deputy Chief Counsel to the Congressional Committee investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. In his professional career, Tanenbaum has never lost a felony case. His courtroom experiences bring his books to life, especially in his bestselling series featuring prosecutor Roger “Butch” Karp and his wife, Marlene Ciampi.

  Tanenbaum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the University of California at Berkeley on a basketball scholarship, and remained at Cal, where he earned his law degree from the prestigious Boalt Hall School of Law. After graduating from Berkeley Law, Tanenbaum moved back to New York to work as an assistant district attorney under the legendary New York County DA Frank Hogan. Tanenbaum then served as Deputy Chief Counsel in charge of the Congressional investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

  The blockbuster novel Corruption of Blood (1994), is a fictionalized account of his experience in Washington, D.C.

  Tanenbaum returned to the West Coast and began to serve in public office. He was elected to the Beverly Hills City Council in 1986 and twice served as the mayor of Beverly Hills. It was during this time that Tanenbaum began his career as a novelist, drawing from the many fascinating stories of his time as a New York ADA. His successful debut novel, No Lesser Plea (1987), introduces Butch Karp, an assistant district attorney who is battling for justice, and Marlene Ciampi, his associate and love interest. Tanenbaum’s subsequent twenty-five novels portrayed Karp and his crime-fighting family and eclectic colleagues facing off against drug lords, corrupt politicians, international assassins, the mafia, and hard-core violent felons.

  In addition to the twenty-six Butch Karp legal thrillers, he has published two nonfiction titles: The Piano Teacher (1987), exploring his investigation and prosecution of a recidivist psychosexual killer, and Badge of the Assassin (1979), about his prosecution of cop killers, which was made into a movie starring James Woods as Tanenbaum.

  Tanenbaum and his wife of forty-three years have three children. He currently resides in California where he has taught Advanced Criminal Procedure at the Boalt Hall School of Law and maintains a private law practice.

  Tanenbaum as a toddler in the early 1940s. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.

  A five-year-old Tanenbaum in Brooklyn, near Ocean Parkway.

  Tanenbaum’s family in the early 1950s. From left to right: Bob; his mother, Ruth (a teacher and homemaker); his father, Julius (businessman and lawyer); and his older brother, Bill.

  Tanenbaum’s high school varsity basketball photo from the ’59–’60 season. He played shooting guard, center, and forward, and earned an athletic scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley, where he continued to play.

  Tanenbaum shooting during a basketball game his junior year of high school. He wore the number 14 throughout high school and college.

  Tanenbaum’s senior portrait. In addition to basketball, he also played first base for his school’s baseball team.

  Standing outside a courthouse in downtown Manhattan are Tanenbaum, James Woods, NYPD detective Cliff Fenton, and Yaphet Kotto. Woods and Kotto played Tanenbaum and Fenton in the 1985 movie Badge of the Assassin, based on Tanenbaum’s book of the same name about a real-life murder mystery in 1971 Harlem.

  Seen here in the late 1980s, Mayor Tanenbaum poses with Ed Koch, then mayor of New York City, while Tanenbaum’s son Billy stands in front wearing a hat given to him by Koch. The two mayors were meeting to discuss a tourist exchange program between Beverly Hills and New York City.

  While mayor of Beverly Hills, Tanenbaum awarded Jimmy Stewart, seen here, with this proclamation of Outstanding Citizen of Beverly Hills in the late 1980s.

  Tanenbaum and his wife, Patti.

  Tanenbaum with Patti and their children Roger, Rachael, and Billy at home in California.

  Tanenbaum’s author photo, which has graced the covers of many of his books.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Excerpt from “Somebody to Love,” music and lyrics by Darby Slick, reprinted by permission of Irving Music, Inc. Copyright © 1967 by Irving Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved.

  copyright © 1991 by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  cover design by Karen Horton

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-1002-4

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  THE BUTCH KARP AND MARLENE CIAMPI SERIES

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  Turn the page for an excerpt from Robert K. Tanenbaum’s exciting new legal thriller

  TRAP

  Available in print and ebook from Gallery Books August 2015

  PROLOGUE

  Zak Karp kicked his legs, grunted, and gasped; the veins in his muscular forearms and one in his forehead bulged from the exertion. He was bound to the back of a wooden chair by heavy ropes. He pushed as hard as he could, repeatedly. After a while he gave up, cursing, his breath a series of white clouds—condensation from the cold air.

  Sitting in the chair next to him with his eyes closed, Zak’s twin brother, Giancarlo, let his breath out slowly. “Quit fighting it,” he said quietly and then opened his eyes, “the more you struggle, the tighter the knots get. I think if I can just relax enough, I might be able to slip out of mine. But I can’t concentrate with you thrashing around like a fish out of water.”

  “Well, you’d better hurry before our ‘friend’ gets back, oh great Yoda,” Zak replied. “Or did you forget what he said he’s going to do to us?” He nodded across the dimly lit, unfinished loft where a red plastic five-gallon container with a white pour spout sat on a rough wooden bench next to a laptop computer. “I’m not real thrilled about burning to death, though it appears it’s going to be that or freeze to death. I’m too young to die . . . I’ve never even been past third base with a girl or pitched for the Yankees. And, I was about to become bar mitzvah with every obnoxious, pimple-faced thirteen-year-old Jewish kid on the Upper Eas
t Side.”

  Giancarlo couldn’t help but chuckle at his twin’s dark humor despite their predicament. But then he frowned. “I thought you gave up on that,” he said. “You didn’t want to be a Jew anymore.”

  As Giancarlo spoke he studied his “older” brother’s handsome face with its strong Italian features and the coloring of their mother, Marlene Ciampi. He knew there was some bruising on the other side of his face from blows he received from their abductor, but Zak was a tough guy and not about to acknowledge that it hurt. He was Giancarlo’s elder only by a few minutes but all of their lives he’d been first in many ways. Bigger, stronger, faster—the better, more natural athlete. He’d also been born with the fiery temperament of the Mediterranean side of their family, which sometimes worked to his advantage—such as when making quick decisions and following through without hesitation—but had also landed them in hot water on occasion. Like right now, Giancarlo thought.

  Giancarlo had the more delicate visage—still leaning more toward their mother’s Sicilian ancestry than their father’s Slavic roots, but more refined and paler than his brother. Although an average, if determined, athlete, he also played a half-dozen instruments, from the violin to the accordion, and schoolwork came easy to him. Zak was no slouch when it came to brains, even if he sometimes acted before thinking, but Giancarlo was decidedly the more cerebral, and cautious, of the two.

  “Yeah, well maybe this Nazi son of a bitch changed my mind for me,” Zak retorted, and then twisted violently against the restraints for what little good it did. He bellowed with helplessness.

  They both knew that no one would hear him. The old tenement building was as solid as the Manhattan bedrock on which it stood. Rust-colored brick walls, thick subflooring, and massive beams comprised the loft and seemed to absorb sound into the shadows. They could hear the outside world through the missing panes of glass in some of the windows. But other than the loud clomping of their heavy-booted captor’s comings and goings, they hadn’t heard any other sounds of habitation from the floors below them.

  The loft itself appeared to be in the midst of a renovation project that had ground to a halt. Several sawhorses and odd bits of lumber and drywall, as well as the bench, were scattered around the largely empty open space. But no workmen had been by in the two days since their abduction, and the teens had surmised that they were sitting in the detritus of yet another New York City developer who ran out of money in mid-construction.

  The building was near the East River, and they could clearly hear the frequent sounds of water traffic, including the clarion whistles of the tugboats. Most of the windows in the loft were boarded up or covered with sheets, but by craning their necks, they could see through two large picture windows behind them that weren’t covered. Across a short distance they observed another former tenement that had been converted to condominiums with lots of windows and a new façade partly covering the old bricks.

  “I hope that’s because you’ve had a change of heart about what it means to be a Jew, not because you’re afraid of what might happen,” Giancarlo said. “Because if that’s the case, you’d be better off committing to mom’s Catholic side of the family. That way you can ask for forgiveness, and ‘poof,’ when you die you go straight to paradise. Judaism’s a little nebulous on whether there’s any such thing as heaven.”

  “Up yours,” Zak retorted. “I’m serious. This guy’s an example of what Jews have always had to put up with. If I have to die, like Mrs. Dubitsky said, I’ll choose to do it as a Jew; I’m just saying I’d like to get through my bar mitzvah first.”

  Giancarlo bit off the sarcastic remark he was going to make and nodded. “Sorry I doubted you.”

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” Zak replied. “I would have doubted me, too. But enough of all this talk about dying; I’m not ready. So start meditating or whatever it is you do and make like Houdini and escape before the storm trooper gets back.”

  Giancarlo’s response was interrupted by a moan from their right. They looked over to where an old woman lay on a filthy mattress that had been placed on the floor.

  “I don’t think she’s doing so good,” Zak observed. “She hasn’t opened her eyes since we got here.” Giancarlo shook his head. “I don’t think she’s had anything to eat or drink in a while. Goldie’s tough, but no one can do that for long, especially not at her age. We’ve got to get help, or she’s going to die.”

  “And so will we,” Zak added.

  A thoughtful look passed across Giancarlo’s face. “Let’s see if we can hop our chairs a few feet over to the right so that the windows are directly behind us.”

  “Why?”

  “I have an idea,” Giancarlo responded. “It probably won’t work but just humor me.”

  Zak shrugged and managed to hop with his brother a few feet to the right. “So now humor me and tell me why we just did that,” he said. But instead of answering, his brother shrieked.

  “Jesus! What’s the matter with you?” Zak demanded in anger and alarm.

  “A rat! A rat just crawled up on my shoulder!”

  “Where is it now?”

  “I don’t know, it jumped down when I shouted!”

  “You mean when you screamed like a twelve-year-old girl. I thought it was something serious.”

  “I don’t like rats.”

  “You and our pal,” Zak said. “You see the way he freaks when he sees a rat? We should try to use that to our advantage. Anyway, it’s gone now so go back to being calm and get us out of here.”

  Giancarlo had just closed his eyes when they heard someone stomping up the stairs and knew that their abductor had returned. The door opened revealing a tall young man in his mid-twenties with a shaved, bullet-shaped head and the sculpted body of a weight lifter. His thin lips turned down in a perpetual frown, and his dark eyes had a feral intelligence to them. But his notable features were the “Sieg Heil” that had been tattooed in black letters two inches high across his forehead and the swastikas inked onto the temples on either side of his head.

  Lars Forsling trudged into the room and stopped next to the workbench. He opened the laptop and turned it so that the screen was pointed at his captives. He smiled at the twins and then over at the prostrate figure of Goldie Sobelman. “Looks like the old Jew bitch isn’t long for this world anyway, ja mein kleiner Juden?” he said with a snicker.

  “Give me a break with the lousy fake German, Lars,” Zak scoffed. “You’re just a muscle freak from Brooklyn and you sound like a character in a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.”

  Forsling’s face flushed dark red as he stormed over to where the twins sat. “Great, now you’ve done it again,” Giancarlo said dryly. This wasn’t the first time his brother had antagonized their abductor, hence the bruising.

  However, just as Forsling raised his hand to hit him, Zak yelled. “Hey creep, you see the rat?”

  Forsling stopped in his tracks and his eyes grew round with fear. He whirled in the direction Zak was nodding. In the shadows over by the wall, a large gray rat sat on its haunches watching them. The young man looked around wildly then picked up a piece of wood from the floor and flung it at the rodent. The rat easily dodged the missile and scampered back through a hole in the wall of one corner of the room.

  Turning back toward the twins, Forsling sneered. “I’m not afraid of a fucking rat.”

  “Yeah, sure you’re not. That’s why your hands are shaking.”

  This time Forsling backhanded Zak across his face. The teen absorbed the blow without a sound, except to spit blood out from his now-split lips. He glared up at his assailant. “You’ll regret that someday.”

  Forsling raised his hand again but hesitated when their eyes met. He quavered ever so slightly and lowered his hand. “You’re the one who’s going to regret that you ever lived,” he laughed nervously. “When your skin is turning black and the fat in your legs is melting, the pain will remind you of your smartass comment. But right now, I have more important things to do.”
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br />   Picking up a roll of duct tape from the floor, Forsling roughly wrapped a piece several times around each teen’s head and mouth, gagging them. Then he stomped back over to the workbench, where he typed on the laptop’s keyboard and then stood off to one side.

  The face of the teens’ father, Roger “Butch” Karp, appeared on the screen. He frowned when he saw his sons gagged and bound to the chairs. His eyes clearly registered his fear for them, but his voice was calm and clear. “This isn’t necessary Lars,” he said. “Let the boys and the woman go; this is between you and me.”

  “So you can see your little Jew boys, right Karp?” Forsling spat.

  “I can. Now let’s talk about this. The boys had nothing to do with what happened to your mother.” A pained look crossed Forsling’s face. “No but you did, Karp, you fucking kike. You and the Jew and nigger cops.”

  “Then come after me,” Karp said. “I’ll meet you anywhere, anytime; just you and me. No cops.”

  Forsling laughed derisively. “Yeah, like a dirty Jew could be trusted to keep his word.”

  “Then who do you trust? Tell me, and I’ll get that person to negotiate for you.”

  “There’s not going to be any negotiations Karp.” Forsling’s voice caught and he wiped at his eyes. “The time for talking was over the minute my mom died because I wasn’t there to save her, Karp, and I wasn’t there because of you and the fucking cops. I told ’em I didn’t do it, but they dragged my ass in anyway, and you kept me there.”

  “They were just doing their job, Lars,” Karp said. “And so was I. All I did was talk to you and let you go.”

  “And my mom burned to death in the meantime.”

  “She fell asleep with a cigarette in bed. I’m sorry. I know that’s got to be painful but don’t make this any worse. Let the boys go and turn yourself in, get a good lawyer to argue you weren’t in your right mind; I’ll put in a word and ask the courts to go easy on you in light of what happened to your mom. And if you’re innocent in the other case, then you have nothing to worry about.”