Irresistible Impulse

by Robert Tanenbaum

  She sighed and walked back to the Tully. She wasn’t a cop; she couldn’t walk up to people and demand that they identify themselves; she couldn’t call for squads of boys in blue to scour a building. She felt like a fool, and she was going to have to appear a fool before Edie Wooten and her family and colleagues. Sheepdog indeed!

  “What did he do?” asked Karp later when she was telling the tale, lying in the crook of his arm on the red couch, with the television muted and a commercial making colored patterns designed to hypnotize and confuse.

  “Oh, he neatly snipped the heads off all the flowers in the room, and left his own bouquet, with a note. Same fancy paper. Roses. They always leave roses, you know that? Nuts, I mean. I would expect mums, lilies, sometimes, but no, it’s always roses. It’s probably genetic.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “It said, ‘Darling, you’re not listening. I may have to get angry with you.’ ”

  “Sounds like my kind of guy,” said Karp. “Ow!”

  “It’s not funny,” said Marlene. “This guy is smart, and I’m starting to think that he could be dangerous.”

  “You like the sister’s squeeze for it?”

  “He was there, and not only there, I saw him again, after, and he gave me a look.”

  “A look?”

  “Yeah, a look, a grin. He knew who I was. But what was I supposed to do, pat him down? See if he had scissors? Roses on his breath? Edie was wiped out when she came back at the intermission. It was incredible that she was able to finish the concert. I am not in good cess with her family and friends.”

  “That was quite a pinch, dear,” said Karp, rubbing the inside of his thigh. “I think I’m bleeding.”

  “You should bleed, a crack like that! Oh, stop pouting! You look just like Zak. Here, I’ll rub it and make it better.”

  “Maybe kissing would make it get better faster.”

  She gave him an appraising look. “I thought you had a big day tomorrow.”

  “I do, but the night is long,” said Karp. He pulled her closer and began to knead the back of her neck.

  “Wait,” she said, attracted by a change in the light from the TV. “I want to watch the news first. Goose the sound.”

  The screen filled with the image of a dark car, and the driver’s door open, the driver’s window shattered and covered with blood. Yellow crime-scene tape marked off the scene, and there was the usual crowd of cop cars and cops wandering about.

  “What’s this?” Karp asked.

  “Sssh!” said Marlene as the camera focused on a well-groomed black man in a tan parka, holding a mike. He spoke for the required twenty seconds, explaining that after a daring daylight kidnapping in the garment district that had left one person dead and one gravely wounded, the victim, Carrie Lanin, had wrested his weapon away from Robert Pruitt, her abductor, and turned it on him, shooting him dead. The anchorman thanked the reporter. The scene shifted to the interior of an office, the camera dwelling lovingly on bloodstains on the wall and floor. A weeping Hispanic woman gave eight seconds about how quickly it had happened, how horrible. Then a still photograph of R. Pruitt from some official file, looking blank and ordinary—message: even guys who look like this can go nuts. Then, finally, a quick shot of Carrie Lanin, frail-seeming with that disaster-survivor stare on her face, being escorted into a building by a uniformed cop and a female detective.

  Marlene zapped off the sound. Karp cleared his throat. He felt chilled.

  “Well,” he said, “you’re not having much of a day.”

  “No,” she said. “I sent Harry to straighten things out. Everybody was real nice to her, he said. I should have gone to see her, but I honestly didn’t have the energy. I’ll go see her tomorrow.” Her tone was dull, as if she were talking to herself.

  “Straight self-defense,” Karp mused in a similar tone. “She got the gun away from him and shot him. That’s not the way it usually goes down.”

  “No,” she said. All the warmth seemed to be leaking from the room. His arm felt like a dead log across her shoulders.

  “She must be a lot tougher than she looks,” he said.

  “Apparently.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess … I mean, it’s probably not a good idea for me to be personally involved in this one. Because of your connection with her. I’ll tell Roland to, ah, report directly to Jack on it. Not that I think there’ll be much to report. If it went down the way it looks.” A long pause. “Did it?”

  “As far as I know,” she said tightly. Neither of them cared to look at the other. Marlene stood up abruptly. “I’m going to bed,” she said without invitation.

  One of the advantages of the new live-in child-care arrangements chez Karp was that Karp could occasionally indulge his cowardice by slipping out of the house early. Normally the most uxorious and paternal of men, there were times when he did not want to engage in familial relationships, and this was one of them. For it was, in fact, a big day for Karp: in the morning Judge Marvin Peoples would entertain oral argument in re: the motions in Rohbling to suppress the confession and to suppress the critical evidence in Jonathan Rohbling’s little blue suitcase, and after that he would rule. In all likelihood, of course, Peoples had already made his decision, or ninety-one percent of it, but in a major case like this one, he would want both attorneys to stand up in front of him and whale away so that the issues would be apparent to the public. Or maybe he really did want explication of the arguments. God knew, they were tortuous enough. Karp had them packed into his head like a model made of bent Popsicle sticks. He felt as if his head was under tension from the inside, as if any emotional or mental shock would collapse the whole structure and leave him blithering before the bench.

  Like, for example, the thought that his wife might have been involved in killing Rob Pruitt. He shook his head vigorously to bar the thought as he walked with characteristic long, stiff strides down Centre Street toward the courthouse. For this reason he had skulked from his home. He had not wanted to see Marlene, or to take the chance of seeing a lie written on her face.

  Terrell Collins was there waiting in the bureau office, as tightly wound as his boss, dressed in his soberest suit and a faint cloud of Aramis. Karp smiled, invited him into his private office, and laid out the coffee and toasted bagels he had purchased for the two of them in the ground-floor snack bar.

  They ate and drank, making desultory talk, listening to the outer office begin work. At five to nine, they walked to Part 46.

  Ordinarily, motions are heard in nearly vacant courtrooms; oral argument is not a major spectator sport. With a case like Rohbling afoot, however, it was a different matter. The press was out in numbers, and Karp and Collins had to fight their way from the elevator to the door of the courtroom through a couple of TV crews and a crowd of journalists waving microphones and mini-recorders.

  The courtroom itself was packed with people: the print press in rows, the families of the victims, their supporters from the black community, and the usual miscellany of legal geeks who showed up at every important trial.

  Karp and Collins sat. Waley came in, looking like he had just spent a week at Gstaad; he nodded, they nodded back. In came Rohbling with his guard; a murmur from the gallery, suppressed hisses. Karp noted that his glasses were still smudged, and that he retained the air of bemused helplessness he had borne at the arraignment. In came Judge Peoples; all rose, all sat.

  Marvin Peoples had a head like a cannonball, one covered in smooth morocco leather. He had a wife and three children, and it is possible that he smiled in their presence, but no one had ever seen him crack a grin on the bench. His voice was a bass rumble.

  “We will begin with the motion to invalidate the confession in this case. Mr. Waley?”

  Waley rose and, in his remarkable voice, began his brilliant exegesis of the law as it related to the legality of confessions. Karp slouched in his seat and took notes. You could always learn something, he thought.

  After the hearin
g, Karp went right up to see the district attorney.

  “There’s good news and bad news,” he said.

  “So I gather,” said Keegan.

  “You heard already?”

  “I have sources, Butch. What happened?” Keegan was wearing his stone face.

  Karp looked him in the eye. “You read the motions and the responses—what can I say? He bought Waley’s argument out of Moran v. Burbine. Confession not voluntary, knowing, and intelligent. Especially the knowing part. The mutt was under treatment and on a course of antipsychotics, had stopped taking them, hence nuts, hence not ‘knowing.’ He went with Smith v. Zant too. I think the clincher was that Rohbling asked for the pills and the cops denied him. The foul breath of Connelly compulsion there, I think. I was nervous about that myself.”

  “And asking for the lawyer, that horseshit about the shrink?”

  “Yeah, and that. Judge made a little law there—the operative fact is the understanding on the part of the police that the suspect is requesting counsel. That the person requested is not in fact counsel does not bear on the requirement to cease the interview. Then he bounced our point from Mosely—the resumption of questioning after the request for counsel was not about a crime different in time, place, and nature. ‘Ingenious, but not compelling, Mr. Karp,’ says His Honor. The critical word there is ‘and,’ according to Judge Peoples. The guy has a legal mind on him, I’ll give him that. Anyway, we lost the confessions.”

  “But you still have Hughes,” said Keegan.

  “Yeah, we still do. And we got the suitcase. The judge went down the line with the McBain argument. Suspect renounced the bag in front of the police and witnesses, therefore it was fair game.”

  “That kid you didn’t want did a good job,” said Keegan, smiling for the first time.

  Karp smiled too. “You want me to take down my pants, give you a better shot? Yeah, he did real good on the motion to suppress evidence response—first-class. I told him he was a credit to his race. When Peoples rolled our way on it, he nearly broke his jaw to keep from grinning, especially since the great white hope here got sunk on his motion. On the other hand, the law is a lot more clear on the suppression of evidence side—”

  “Oh, wah wah!” said Keegan, chuckling now.

  “A lot more clear,” said Karp with a straight face, “as well you know; Fourth Amendment is like Macy’s window compared to the Fifth and the Miranda precedents, where we see but through a glass, darkly. That’s why he did it.”

  Keegan looked confused. “Who did what?”

  “The judge,” said Karp. “Peoples. He had two motions. No way in hell was he going to give both of them to either side, not in this case. Guy’s carving a statue—Mr. Fair, in fucking bronze. So he zinged us on the one with the most tortured law, and the one where we had the weakest line. He’s saying, we’re not going to play with confessions here, buddy. I’m giving you your physical evidence, now make a case! He wants this trial.”

  “As do we. And will you make the case?”

  It was not a casual question, and Karp did not answer lightly. “As to the facts? Absolutely. The guy was there, ID’d going in and going out in lineups by stand-up citizens. We have the wig and the makeup, and both match evidence found at the crime scene. His dyed skin was under her nails, for Christ’s sake! The suitcase fibers match the ones in the vic’s throat. He left prints on the tea things. On and on. And there’s the ashtray. He was there, he killed her. That’s not the problem. The problem is that after Peoples handed down on the suppression-of-evidence motion, Waley got up and changed his plea to NGI.”

  Keegan grunted. “This doesn’t make me fall off my chair.”

  “No, me either. So it’ll be dueling shrinks.”

  “Yes,” said Keegan. A meaningful pause, and then the district attorney said, “You’re still going with the Ancient Mariner.”

  “Dr. Perlsteiner. Yes.”

  “This is an error, in my opinion. He’s too old to make the right impression.”

  Karp shrugged. “What can I do, Jack? I trust the guy. He’s done real good for us in the past. Meanwhile, if you don’t like the way I’m handling the case—”

  “Oh, don’t be an ass!” Keegan snapped. “Who the hell else am I going to put in there? Superman’s booked solid and Jesus is dead. No, it’s you, bucko, and as much as I’d like it if you listened to me just once …” He stopped and picked up one of his ever present Bering silvery cigar tubes and twirled it around his fingers. “Let me say this,” he resumed, “just so you understand. I am now bracing myself for calls from uptown, during which I will express to what we used to call the colored community the highest confidence in Mr. Roger Karp and in his ability to win this case. This is not a lie. No, I take it back: it’s only a little lie, because I thought and I think that you were a damn fool to take it on. Now I realize it’s not your fault, but Rohbling now has a free pass on the murders of four black women. If he gets a walk to Happy Valley on the fifth …” Here he shook his head and rolled his eyes. “There will be a typhoon of shit flying around, and I will not be able to protect you, not without walking away from this chair myself, which I don’t intend to do. Now, do we understand each other?”

  “Yeah, we do. You really think I’m a jerk, don’t you?”

  “I do. But I also think you’re the best murder prosecutor in the city.”

  “Next to you.”

  The lights on the D.A.’s phone had begun to flash.

  “No,” said Keegan, “because I am the district attorney, and the district fucking attorney, like, as I once supposed, the chief of the Homicide Bureau, does not try gigantic murder cases. Now scram, and God bless you. I got to take these calls.”

  Marlene sat in her office wondering why, having devoted her life to helping people much in need of help, she did not have a friend in the world. She had just gotten off the phone with Carrie Lanin’s sister, who was staying with her in the wake of her outing with Pruitt. The sister said that Carrie didn’t want to speak to her, that she was devastated by what had happened. “Why didn’t you protect her?” she had said. Why didn’t you? was Marlene’s thought, but she had said nothing, had just taken it and made soothing noises and had hung up the phone, depressed.

  Her conversation with Harry had done nothing to improve the mood. Harry had gotten the buzz from the detectives who had caught the Pruitt case: much wrinkling of noses around the precinct. On the other hand, a great story—girl slays killer abductor—and the cops didn’t see much of a percentage in spending a lot of time trying to break Lanin’s story, if breakable, only to find out if she had received any help in whacking a guy who, all agreed, badly wanted whacking.

  But Harry was mightily pissed, believing that somehow Marlene had set the whole thing up and, worse, set it up without consulting him. So Harry hated her too.

  As did, naturally, La Wooten and her family and associates. Marlene fingered the copy of the Times on her desk, where it lay turned to the review of the recent concert. The reviewer had raved over the Shostakovich performance. It had “captured all the despair and agony inherent in the piece.” No kidding, thought Marlene. Wooten and her group had gone back to play after seeing what the Music Lover had done in the dressing room, Wooten red faced and sniffling with her eyes streaming. It was just bad luck that the slimeball had gotten past both of them. She never should have left the hallway, never should have shown herself in the lobby, should never have answered her beeper, should have had another man … Meanwhile Marlene had started some of her people on an examination of Wooten’s intimates and of the people known to be in the Julliard buildings at the time. Not much hope there, just checking for criminal records and asking around. Any perverts among you musicians? Still, something could turn up, and then there was the boyfriend. Definitely she wanted to know more about the boyfriend.

  Marlene threw the newspaper into the wastebasket and stomped out of her office. She could hear Tranh in the back of the office, rattling pots. Perhaps she should s
aunter over and sit down for a cup of excellent filtre and a discussion of Verlaine? Non, merci. For now Tranh was to be avoided, at least until she had arranged a suitably safe place for him in her mind.

  She walked out of her cubicle to the open area. Lucy was lying in her accustomed after-school position, belly down on the oriental rug with her books and papers spread around her head end like a messy blossom. She was writing firmly and confidently on a worksheet. Marlene stood for a moment watching her daughter. She was certainly becoming a long drink of water: the pipe-stem legs were in constant motion, crossing and recrossing, flicking upward so that the heels nearly touched the barely swelling butt and then splaying outward in a demonstration of near-gymnastic limberness. Her head was thrust forward close to the paper so that her mass of black curls swung forward, obscuring the worksheet to all but their owner. Not an ergonomic position, but Marlene could remember doing her homework the same way at Lucy’s age. Like her mother, Marlene thought: a precocious child, with a remarkable gift for languages. Unlike her mother, who had been a docile wimp at that age, Lucy was a wiseass who exhibited occasional flashes of adult-like perception and maturity. Eight going on eleven going on thirty.