Irresistible Impulse

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Karp was into his peroration, rolling, feeling good, feeling the jury was focused, attentive, with him. He had told them what the crime was, had told them Rohbling had done it, and now he was about to defuse, to the extent he could at this point, the only possible defense.

  “This is an unusual crime, ladies and gentlemen, something you don’t see every day. Some would even call it bizarre. But throughout this trial I would like you to keep one thing clear in your minds. We are not here to examine the inner workings of a human mind. The law does not trouble itself with reasons. We all have dark feelings, fears, rages, worries. I do. You do. But we are civilized, decent human beings. We don’t let ourselves be carried away by our obsessions. And so we must try to concern ourselves exclusively with Jonathan Rohbling’s actions. We will show in the course of the trial just exactly what the defendant did to Jane Hughes. We will show how he planned to disguise himself as a black man, so that he could walk freely around Harlem and insinuate himself into the confidence of Mrs. Hughes. We will show that, far from succumbing to any spontaneous mad rage, he brought into the apartment of the unsuspecting victim his murder weapon, a cloth suitcase, with which he planned and intended to smother her to death. We will show that after the crime, far from surrendering himself to the police, shocked at what he might have done in a moment of uncontrollable rage, or in the derangement of his mind, he stealthily and carefully made his escape. We will show that days later, when confronted by a police detective on the trail of Mrs. Hughes’s murderer, as you will learn, he steadfastly denied that the suitcase he had used in the murder was even his. He was fully aware of the evil he had done, fully aware that it was wrong. He didn’t want anything to do with that suitcase, because he knew that it connected him with the crime. He knew, as you will learn, that in that suitcase there was evidence that placed him in Jane Hughes’s apartment, that announced him as the murderer. And so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, when you have considered all the evidence we will present, we believe that you will find that the defendant, Jonathan Rohbling”—here Karp paused and looked for a scant three beats at the defendant. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the jury looking too, which was the point. Rohbling appeared scrawny in his nice gray suit. His glasses were still smudged, and his lips were still flecked with the white crust. In the moment that the eyes turned on him, the muscles on the side of his face gave a decided twitch. Karp twirled on his heel and faced the jury, selecting at random the eye of juror number four, Mrs. Ethel McNamara, to hold with his own, and continued— “… planned to murder Jane Hughes, did murder Jane Hughes, and sought to escape from the consequences of a horrible crime that he knew he had done, that he knew was the worst crime one human being can perpetrate against another; and therefore, the People expect that you will find the defendant guilty of the crime for which he has been indicted, the crime of murder in the second degree.”

  Karp sat down at the prosecution table. Judge Peoples said, “Mr. Waley?”

  Waley rose and declined to open until later. Karp caught from the jury box a tiny sigh of disappointment, a fainter version of the sort heard at the theater when they announce that the star is to be replaced by an understudy. Karp, oddly, felt disappointed himself. At the judge’s direction he rose again and called city engineer Michael Constanzio to present a drawing of the crime scene.

  “That went pretty good,” said Terrell Collins.

  “Yeah, well, there’s not much you can do to screw up the obligatory witnesses,” Karp replied. “He’s not going to waste much time opposing the fact that a woman got killed in New York County.” They were gathering up their materials, cleaning off the long prosecution table.

  “I thought he’d object more. When we showed the crime-scene shots—”

  “No, he’s piling up treasure with Peoples,” said Karp. “Peoples likes a smooth run. And like I told you, he doesn’t need a different theory of the case. He’s going to walk the little turd on insanity.”

  The hallway outside the courtroom was packed with the press and garishly lit by the lamps of the TV crews. Karp and Collins no-commented and body-checked their way through the throng to the elevators. Once in the car, Karp passed his folders to Collins and slipped out of the building via the D.A.’s back exit.

  He trotted south through the chilly street to the Federal Building and went up to Menotti’s office, where a secretary directed him to a conference room.

  He slipped in and sat in a chair against the wall, meaning to be unobtrusive, for someone as large as Karp always a difficult goal. In fact, everyone in the room looked up at him. Paul Menotti, sitting at the head of the table, glowered. V.T. Newbury smiled and waved. Cynthia Doland, at her boss’s right hand, regarded him with her usual neutral expression. Menotti paused and hastily introduced Karp to the three strangers at the table. The elderly black man in the dark jacket and clerical collar was Ephraim Coates, the chairman of the board of St. Nicholas Medical Centers, Inc. The thick middle-aged woman in the cerise suit and the gold jewelry was Dr. Sylvia Olivero, the director of the St. Nicholas clinic at 135th Street in East Harlem. The third stranger was Vincent Robinson.

  The meeting continued. Karp was something of a connoisseur of interrogatory events, and before too many minutes had passed he realized that this one was not getting anywhere. It was, in the parlance of the prosecutorial bar, a mere circle jerk. Coates was clearly a respectable stooge who had no answers to the technical questions the federal prosecutor wanted answered. Olivero had the answers, but her performance seemed too pat, as if she had been rehearsed, and the answers she gave drove the meeting ever deeper into the bottomless morass of Medicaid regulations, an area in which the doctor had more experience than anyone else in the room. Robinson was polite and bored; they had nothing solid on him and he knew it.

  Equally bored, and starting to feel the exhaustion of a day in court, Karp had started glancing at his watch and thinking about how he might gracefully retire when V.T. rose and walked out of the room, motioning Karp to follow him.

  In the hallway, V.T. grinned and rolled his eyes. “Fascinating, isn’t it? All the thrills and glamour of Broadway as it used to be.”

  “I’m uncharmed, V.T., and I’m beat. Like the old lady said, where’s the beef?”

  “This is the vegetarian part, I’m afraid,” said V.T. “What do you think of Robinson?”

  “He looks as bored as I felt. What’ve you got on him?”

  “Between you and me? In the language of your people, bupkis. St. Nicholas is dirty, we know that, but welcome to the club. Whether they’re dirty like every other poverty health operation, or dirty dirty, felony dirty, is something that it’s going to take the usual eighteen months to determine. Meanwhile, my quasi-legal sources in the banking industry inform me that the doc has something like seventeen million dollars in accounts in various banks in Grand Cayman. The deposits started nine years ago when Robinson first got his Medicaid mills going, but approximately three-quarters of that total had been placed there over the last year—cash deposits. What does that suggest to you?”

  Karp shrugged. “That he’s found some new way to scam Medicaid?”

  “Uh-uh. Medicaid pays in attractive green checks. Robinson’s declared income is in the form of checks paid by private clients, and checks issued to him by St. Nick as a shareholder and medical adviser. He could conceivably have drawn cash off those, but we checked with his banks and he didn’t. So wherefrom all this cash? Who that we know runs an all-cash business?”

  “What, he’s connected?” Karp laughed at the thought. “Robinson is a Mob guy? Come on, V.T., the guy may be slime, but he’s Park Avenue slime.”

  “I’m glad you think it’s funny,” said V.T. huffily. “But it’s hard to explain those deposits any other way.”

  “Okay, so what’s your theory? He’s moving coke to the upper crust?”

  “No, not coke. He doesn’t need coke. He’s a doctor who runs a ton of drugs through a network of clinics. He’s also got a multimillion-doll
ar accounting system. I’m thinking prescription drugs, or money laundering, or a little of both. He lays off some of the cost of his product on the public fisc, and then sells to the wise guys for cash on the barrel.”

  “Hm, put that way, it’s not too funny anymore,” said Karp. “It sure adds weight to the possibility that Robinson whacked that nurse. A white-collar fraud is one thing, assuming she was going to rat him on it, but now you’re talking Rockefeller Law minimum sentences for dope. Look, V.T.: let’s go back in there and you get Menotti to let me ask him a question.”

  They did so. Newbury whispered into Menotti’s ear. He frowned, then nodded. After finishing the line of questioning he had under way, Menotti said, heavily, “The Homicide Bureau would like to ask Dr. Robinson a question. Mr. Karp?”

  “Yes, thank you, Paul. Dr. Robinson, was Evelyn Longren ever involved in transferring payments of any kind for the St. Nicholas organization?”

  Karp watched Robinson’s face very carefully when he said the name and was rewarded by a fascinating display. First, the quick involuntary flicker of alarm, which was what Karp was looking for, then a brief moment of calculation, the eyes blank, then the feigned innocent recollection, the handsome brow knotted. (The other two St. Nicholas people were genuinely puzzled. It was clear that they had no idea who Evelyn Longren was.)

  “No, Miss Longren was my private nurse at my private practice,” Robinson said. “She had no contact at all with my work at the medical centers.” Robinson was looking Karp right in the eye as he said this, and after he said it he smiled and kept the stare. Karp had been lied to by experts, and he knew the signs, and he also knew well the arrogant gaze of the malefactor who knows you have nothing on him, who knows he’s going to get away with it, and loves rubbing the world’s face in it. Why can’t they ever resist showing off? Karp thought, and returned the smile. Deep in his prosecutorial heart, almost below the conscious level, he felt a familiar little sensation, a precise analogy to the beep that sounds in the cockpit of an F-15 when its missile has locked onto a target.

  “Posie’s back,” said Sym over the intercom late that afternoon. “She already sneaked in the back there, but you ought to go see her.”

  Marlene found the young woman in the nursery with the twins, who were bubbling with glee to have their nurse back and, apparently, delighted with the new colors in her face. Tranh had vanished into his kitchen. Zak was on her lap, trying to tug off the fresh bandage that covered her left eye and ear. Zik was tapping like an osteopath on the cast on her right wrist, using a rubber Zimby.

  “Christ in Heaven!” Marlene cried. “What happened to you?”

  “I’m sorry, Marlene,” said Posie in a whispery voice. “I should’ve called. I had to go to the emergency room and—”

  “Oh, don’t be silly! You’re hurt. What happened?”

  “I was, like, in a car wreck,” said Posie, looking at Marlene and then quickly away.

  “Oh, yeah? Whose car? When was this?”

  “Um, last night. Some guy, I didn’t know his name.”

  “Uh-huh. You went to St. Vee’s?”

  She had. Not wanting to waste time listening to more lies, Marlene went back to her office and called St. Vincent’s emergency room. Identifying herself (illegally) as a police officer, she found, after a number of calls, the duty nurse who had treated Posie. The duty nurse, a woman for whom blunt trauma was as an open book, did not think Posie had been injured in a car accident. She thought Posie had been beaten, and had so reported it to the police, as required by law.

  Marlene said nothing after she got off the phone, but went back to work. Harry came back, cursing equally the Germans and ladies’ professional tennis. They shared news, and then Marlene took Posie and the boys and Lucy back to the loft. While Posie was giving the boys their bath and Lucy was settled with her homework, Marlene rifled the patched denim bag that served Posie as a purse, locating a ragged address book, from which she recorded one address. She changed into her black leather pants and engineer boots and put on her motorcycle jacket and a Yankees cap, into which she thrust her hair. Then she went to her tool closet, took an eighteen-inch pipe wrench from her plumber’s chest, wrapped this object in several sheets of the Times, and walked out.

  Twenty minutes later, Marlene was pounding on the door of a tenement apartment at Sixth Street off C. The door was painted the color of old dried blood, and little flakes of it bounced into the air as she struck it. The hallway stank of hot lard, it being largely a Latino building now, but the smell seemed to be mixed with the scorched chicken feather stink of the former Jews layered over the cabbage of the yet more former Irish.

  After three minutes of banging a voice answered from the other side: a curse and an inquiry. Posie’s Luke was a late, heavy sleeper.

  “It’s me, Luke. Open up, honey!” Marlene called out sweetly.

  Heavy steps. The door rattled and swung open. Luke Last-name-unimportant stood blinking in the doorway, dressed in a pair of ragged blue jeans and nothing else, a thin man in his late twenties, with a stupid-handsome face and shoulder-length dirty dirty-blond hair.

  “Yeah, what?” he asked and then, looking her over, “Who’re you?” Marlene had her baseball cap pulled low over her forehead.

  “Do you always come to the door with your fly wide open?” she inquired. Of course, he looked down, and when he did, Marlene whacked him over the head with the pipe wrench.

  He staggered back into the apartment, his knees sagging. Marlene followed him in, slamming the door behind her, and hit him across the face with the wrench, a two-handed tennis serve swing. He went down, sprawling on his back, blood exploding from his nose. Marlene stood above him, adopted a wood-chopper’s stance, and brought the head of the tool down on his groin as hard as she could. He shrieked high and loud, and curled up on his side in a fetal position, breathing hoarse, bubbly cries. Marlene knelt beside him with her knee pressed into his neck.

  “This is for Posie,” she hissed into his ear. “You are not to see her again. You are not to talk to her on the phone. If you see her coming on the street, you are to run away. In fact, the best thing for you to do is to get out of town permanently. If I hear that you have seen her or talked to her, I will come back, with help, and then I will take you apart. You will not be able to walk or talk or move for years after that. Nod your head if you understand.”

  He nodded so hard he sprayed blood all around his head, like a flower.

  Down in the street, Marlene had to lean against her car with her head down before the nausea passed. She stripped the bloody, shredded newspaper from the wrench and tossed it into a waste-basket. She used a tissue to wipe up blood drops. They came off easily from the oily leather.

  Marlene drove slowly to Grand Street to buy her family dinner. She ordered two large pizzas at Lombardi’s on Spring Street and, to kill time while they were baking, she walked down Mott to Grand and Ferrara’s. There, at one of the tables in the back, she saw Father Dugan, dressed in a canvas jacket and a flannel shirt, sitting with a youth of about eighteen wearing a maroon parochial school blazer. The boy had the kind of Irish beauty that drew the eye, especially Marlene’s eye: shiny red curls, that milky skin, eyes from heaven. She sat one table away from them. They were deep in conversation, speaking in low, confidential voices, and if the priest noticed her, he made no sign. The waitress came, and she ordered a double-shot americano and a napoleon pastry. After violence, sugar was Marlene’s rule.

  The two had stopped talking while the waitress was at Marlene’s table. When she left, Father Dugan met Marlene’s eye and nodded, smiling. “Join us?” he said.

  Marlene moved her coffee and napoleon and sat in a chair at the other table. The boy stared at her, confused. He blushed, the red moving up his pale cheeks like spilled wine on a tablecloth.

  “This is Kevin Mulcahey, Marlene. Marlene Ciampi, one of our parishioners,” said the priest. The boy mumbled a greeting but did not offer to shake hands. He said, “Well, hum, thanks,
Father. I’ll see you later.” He got up so abruptly he knocked his chair over, made an embarrassed noise, righted the chair, snatched up an ugly plastic, bulging briefcase and almost ran from the restaurant.

  “Gosh, I’m sorry,” said Marlene. “I didn’t mean to scare your friend away.”

  “Oh, Kevin’s all right. He’s a little nervous. We were discussing his vocation.”

  “You’re recruiting him?”

  “Rather the reverse. I’m advising him to take some time.”

  “You don’t think he’d make a good priest?”

  Father Dugan sipped his cappuccino contemplatively. “I have no opinion either way, but the fact is, he lusts after women and it frightens him to death, and so he imagines that becoming a priest will solve the problem. I was trying to suggest to him, gently, that this is not necessarily the case.”

  “You’re speaking from personal experience?” Marlene ventured lightly. He looked at her, his face calm but his eyes radiating the sort of soul-shriveling loving disappointment she recalled so well from Sacred Heart. They must have a special school that teaches them how to do that, Marlene thought as adolescent sweat broke out on her face.

  He broke the gaze and said musingly, “Yes, sex. It’s so difficult for secular people to comprehend that there are a certain number of men and women in the world who don’t care for it, for whom it’s rather an irritation. Like psoriasis, for example. Or they just don’t like it, like some people just can’t stand olives or peanut butter. Some of these people are naturally attracted to celibate institutions and are content in them. Others of them persist in sexual activity because the society seems to demand it and they don’t wish to appear odd or unhealthy, and so they are unhappy and make their partners unhappy. Conversely, there are highly sexed people who have been taught that those feelings are shameful and to seek refuge in celibacy. They often get into trouble. As they say, when priests fail it’s either Punch or Judy. But there are worse things too, sad to say. Choirboys, et cetera.” He paused and looked at her closely before resuming. “A few of these, however, are able to convert their passion into spirituality, and these become the great saints in the world—Augustine, of course, Francis, Teresa of Avila, St. Ignatius Loyola—”