Irresistible Impulse

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Thank you, Your Honor, but no. My cross-examination will be quite brief.”

  Karp approached the witness, who glared at him and tightened his jaw.

  “Mr. al-Barka, why are you here?”

  The man seemed surprised by the question and suspicious of its intent. “Mr. Waley asked me to come and testify,” he answered.

  “But you were not compelled in any way?”

  “No.”

  “So it was a favor, then, was it?”

  “I come to speak the truth in the interests of justice. Justice is dear to Allah.”

  “As is money, apparently. How much were you paid to testify, sir?”

  “I didn’t get nothing.”

  “But Mr. Waley made a substantial contribution to your mosque, did he not? A thousand dollars?”

  “We are enjoined to give alms and be charitable. As this money is a tiny portion of the reparation due the—”

  “Thank you, sir,” Karp cut in. “So that’s one reason why you’re testifying for a man that ordinarily you would not lift a finger to help. But there’s another reason, isn’t there? You are a member of the Nation of Islam, are you not?”

  “I am, yes.”

  “And you are therefore a reader of its newspaper, The Messenger, yes?”

  “Yes, I read it.” Uncertainly.

  Karp went to his table and pulled from a folder a copy of that paper. “Did you read this past Thursday’s edition, where the editor says that white justice will never convict a white man for murdering black women, and that when this happens the black vanguard will rise up and, I quote, ‘Put the city to the torch’?”

  “I may have. So what?”

  Mr. al-Barka was looking confused. Karp said, “Well, I was just wondering, sir, would you like to see what you call white justice fail in this case? Would you like to see the city put to the torch?”

  “Objection!” from Waley. “Hypothetical and irrelevant.”

  “Sustained. Jury will disregard.”

  Karp changed step like a forward driving past a blocking guard. “Mr. al-Barka, you’ve testified that you spent considerable time in the defendant’s company when you were boys. What, if any, peculiar or unusual behavior did you observe? No, don’t look at Mr. Waley, look at me!”

  “He was just a typical spoiled white brat.”

  “Typical, I see. Did he do anything strange?”

  “Besides rubbing shi—stuff all over him?”

  “Yes, besides that.”

  The man thought for a few moments. “He was really sneaky.”

  “How so?”

  “Lying all the time. Breaking stuff and blaming it on the dogs. On me. Hiding. Driving everyone crazy looking for him.”

  “I see. Sneaky and secretive. Did he ever talk to people who weren’t there?”

  “No.”

  “Or say he heard voices?”

  “No.”

  “Or think he was somebody other than Jonathan Rohbling?”

  “No,” said al-Barka, and then, remembering why he was there, hastily added, “But he was a crazy kid. I mean, he—”

  Swish. Karp turned away. “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  Marlene sat with Jack Wolfe at the edge of the tennis court, near the umpire’s stand, in the place reserved for security personnel. Wolfe was having some sort of tantrum, and Marlene didn’t quite know what to do about it.

  “Wolfe,” she said consolingly, “it was an honest mistake. I thought the asshole looked good too.”

  “I should have waited,” Wolfe said, pounding his fist on his knee. “You told me to wait. I should have waited.”

  “Wolfe, everybody makes mistakes. You thought he was going for a weapon, you reacted.”

  Wolfe had indeed reacted, throwing his hard-muscled body across two rows of spectators and flattening the man in the yellow shirt and white hat, who proved not to be the stalker but a lawyer from New Rochelle, who was going to sue Wolfe, Marlene, the firm, the club, the tournament, the town of Southampton, Suffolk County, and the manufacturers of the camera he was reaching for when Wolfe had jumped him, which had negligently shattered, scratching his hand.

  It was not these legal threats that had brought Wolfe to this state, Marlene thought, but his own exaggerated sense of responsibility and a kind of self-scarifying perfectionism that Marlene had often observed among members of the police, and which she believed was one of the side effects of the drug testosterone. So she counseled him, stroking his ego with her voice, while the thwock-thwock went on and Trude Speyr won set and match.

  Cheers, the crowd rose, the rivals embraced at mid-court, hordes of press descended, clicking madly like giant insects. Marlene, Wolfe, Dane, several other security hirelings, and Speyr’s personal entourage drew the girl athlete into their protective embrace and made for the showers. The VIP locker room at South Shore was a suite of nicely appointed cubicles on the ground floor of the main clubhouse, reachable from the courts via a breezeway. Marlene led the way, went into the women’s section, checked that there were no lurkers, stole some courtesy miniatures of cologne and shampoo, and passed Speyr in.

  Fifteen minutes later, dewy-fresh, dressed in a white linen ensemble, Speyr emerged from her cubicle and said, “Oh, Marlene, I have such a headache. Do you have aspirin maybe?”

  Marlene did. Speyr took two, and began a complaint about how rude the press corps was in America, not like in Germany, except for the Italians, who were even than the Americans more rude, and, if it possible could they go by a way not the press to see?

  Naturally, Marlene and Harry had scoped out all the possible ins and outs associated with the building. Marlene raised Harry on the comm. channel and had a brief discussion. They could take her out the front parking lot, reserved for members during the tournament, rather than the rear lot, where the press and fans had gathered. There was an inner stairway that led from the locker room to the dining room on what was, since the building was constructed on a slope, its second-floor rear but ground-floor front. They would take that stairway, pass through the dining room, and go out the front of the building, where a limo would be waiting.

  This they did. Marlene sent the two temp guys out to check the route. These radioed back the all-clear, and then Marlene, Speyr, Dane, and Wolfe went up, through the deserted dining room, through the lobby, and out into the dazzling, sun-washed parking lot. A long gray Caddie was parked at the curb, Harry standing by the door, talking to the tennis player’s father and her manager. They were all smiling.

  Walking rapidly with the little group, Marlene cast her eyes around, checking the people. Two uniformed valet parkers, a groundsman in blue coverall and tan pith helmet, carrying a trash basket, a group of three women, staring, an elderly couple, the man raising his camera.

  They were twenty feet from the car when the groundsman charged. His pith helmet fell off. Marlene could clearly see Manfred Stolz’s red hair. He did not look much like the New Rochelle lawyer, after all, if anything somewhat less bloodthirsty. He had a sword in his hand. Sunlight flashed for an instant off its edge.

  Marlene reached for her gun. Dane engulfed the tennis player in his arms. Stolz raised his weapon, which Marlene could now see was not a sword but a long machete-like brush knife. Her gun was not on her left hip where it usually was, and so her hand grasped futilely at air, until she recalled that she was wearing a different gun in a different place. By then it was too late. The man was right over her, his arm lifted for the killing blow. Marlene had time to note that his face was oddly calm, as if he were about to clip a rose.

  Terrell Collins said, “Well, I think we got some back today.” He was looking at Karp with more than the usual admiration. They were in Karp’s office for their standard postmortem.

  “Yeah, well, we were due some,” said Karp. “I’ve been fucking up so badly lately …” He let the thought die. “Now that I look at it again, Waley was taking a chance there, but it could’ve paid off.”

  “How do you mean?”
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  “Focus on the psychology. What ‘made’ him do it. It’s the sly way into the irresistible-impulse defense.”

  “But there isn’t an irresistible-impulse defense, not in this state anyway,” Collins objected.

  “Not legally, but it’s there, in the jury’s mind. Look, what’s his real game plan, Waley? The D. got a trauma so overwhelming that he couldn’t help going after black old women. Hence the witness testifying to the specific trauma, an eyewitness to the supposedly exculpatory events. Now, this is horse-shit legally. The law doesn’t care what happened to Rohbling back then. It doesn’t care what his mental state was back then or what it was at any moment aside from the moment when he committed the crime. But the jury does. It’s like looking at clouds. Look, there’s a horsy, there’s a bunny! Juries like vivid stories, and irresistible impulse is the story Waley’s selling, although he’ll never use the phrase out loud. It’s great too, because everyone’s experienced a moment of blinding rage, a time when they thought about doing something really horrible. Waley’s saying, imagine not being able to resist that. What we have to do, on the other hand, is focus on the crime—was he crazy at that moment? A hard sell, which is why the insanity defense is fucked. Ordinarily, I mean.”

  “Well, you took the starch out of al-Barka’s part of it, anyway. You discredited him—he just came for a soapbox and for money. And the D. wasn’t crazy as a kid.”

  “Yeah, but it was a nice-to-have for him and a had-to-win for us, as bad as we’re doing. He’s got the big mo right now.” Karp sipped the dregs of cold coffee in his cup and made a face. “Well,” he said, “I’ve got to go home.”

  “Me too,” said Collins. “Good day, though.”

  “Fair day.” Karp gave his colleague a sharp look and went on, “We’re not going to win this one, I hope you’re prepared for that.”

  With an uncertain look Collins said, “What do you mean, we’re not going to win?”

  “Just that. We’re fighting for a hanger here and a rematch.”

  “You’re joking! I mean, we’re not doing that bad.”

  “No, just bad enough. I don’t know how many times I’ve said it in bureau meetings, and here’s the practical demonstration. A murder prosecution has to be as perfect as human beings can make anything. And I wasn’t. But you will be, ace.”

  “Me?”

  “Uh-huh. When we retry this fucker, if we get the chance, it’ll be all yours. Sit down, Terry, you’re turning white.”

  Collins laughed explosively, a release of energy, but he did not appear to be amused.

  “What did you think,” said Karp benignly, “that I was going to repeat? You know the difference between a man and a rat? If you put a rat in a maze and every time he turns to the right you shock the shit out of him, after a while he starts turning left. I aspire to rathood in my old age. I learned my lesson: the bureau chief can’t do major trials, or maybe this bureau chief with a wife and three kids can’t. Yeah, Connie … what?”

  The secretary had burst into the office without her usual brief knock, her face pulled into deep grooves by concern. She said,” Butch, is Marlene out on the Island, at some tennis tournament?”

  Karp had to think. “Yeah, she is. Why? What happened?”

  “Jerry O’Bannion from Part 41 just called and said he was watching TV in the court officers’ coffee room and they had a news flash. Some maniac attacked a tennis player. They caught him, but they said he cut up some security people, and Jerry thought they said one of them was Marlene. He said he thought he saw her on the TV with—” She stopped, her voice breaking.

  “What? With what?” Karp demanded.

  “With blood all over her.”

  Marlene was covered with blood—her hair was matted with it on one side, and it had granulated in the creases of her neck. She had wiped her face with her hand so she could see, but her blue blazer and shirt and bra were soaked through with blood, heavy, sticky, congealing gore, pulling at her skin in the most disgusting manner. Her nose filled with the reek of it, that nasty butcher-shop stink.

  Her head hurt too. When the blow hit her, she thought for a moment that it was Stolz’s machete, and that her skull was split and that she was going to die. She fell into that dark, reverberating place where you go in the first seconds after a physical trauma, and she thought briefly, with sadness, of Lucy, and how she would grow up without a mother, and then she felt a weight crushing her into the pavement. She could hardly breathe, but this feeling itself gave her some confidence that she was not in fact lying on the ground with her brains indecently exposed.

  Suddenly, the weight was off her. She raised her head, then went up on her elbow. There was grit in her eye, and she started to rub it out. She was aware of grunts and a heaving mass a few inches from her face, and the sound of screams and running footsteps, and someone was shouting, “Get her away! Get her away!”

  And then she heard a peculiar bubbling, whistling sound that she had never heard before and never wanted to hear again, and instantly her face and the upper part of her body were covered in hot liquid. She was blind. A second or two later Harry was at her side. He had scooped her up, and before she could fully catch her breath, she was in the ambulance that had been parked in the lot for the tournament, and rolling at speed with its siren screaming.

  Now she was in a little screened-off area of the emergency room of Southampton Community Hospital. A doctor had come in to see her, had found that there was nothing seriously wrong, had given her two Darvon and left her alone. Marlene’s mind was more or less frozen solid. She would have sat in that cheap plastic chair until it was time for her to be moved to the geriatric ward, or so she thought.

  Then Harry Bello came in carrying a Styrofoam cup. He handed it to her. She drank the warm liquid and found that it was a scant ounce of coffee on top of what tasted like John Jameson’s.

  “Oh, God, Harry, thank you!” she sighed. “This will earn you three hundred years’ remission in purgatory.”

  “I need it. How do you feel?”

  “Oh, I bet I feel a lot better than I look, and I feel like shit,” she said. They both smiled. She drank some more and felt humanity flooding back into her. “How’s Wolfe?”

  “Cut. His arms’re cut, his chest. Lots of stitches but nothing seriously wrong.”

  “That’s terrific! And … I presume Herr Stolz is no longer with us?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Harry. “I think you got the whole five quarts.”

  “Did you see it go down? It’s still a blur to me.”

  “Yeah, more or less. The whole thing took five seconds. Stolz charged, waving that machete. By the way, he’d been working there three months. Phony name. He really was a groundskeeper, in Germany. Fucking Griffin—”

  “Forget it, Harry. Then what?”

  “Okay, as soon as he made his move, Dane picked up Speyr and started running with her toward the car. It was incredible. He practically tucked her under his arm, like he was going for a first down. Wolfe knocked you out of the way with his forearm and climbed all over you to get to Stolz. Fucker missed his first shot, and then came backhand and cut Wolfe up, and then Wolfe grabbed his arm and popped him one in the face, but he tripped over you and dragged the both of them down on top of you. Then they rolled off and wrestled for the thing, and Stolz got his throat cut. Wolfe can’t remember doing it.”

  Marlene’s beeper went off. “Oh, Christ, that’s my husband,” she moaned.

  “The fucking blade was sharp enough to shave with,” Harry finished.

  Karp calmed down appreciably when he understood that she was not hurt. Then he got mad.

  “I can’t stand this, Marlene.”

  “I know.”

  “I love you!”

  “I know. I love you too, but it’s not enough.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not enough? I don’t love you enough?”

  “No, I mean you hate what I do. And I want to keep doing it.”

  A long silence. Marlene d
isliked talking this way on the phone, and being covered with congealing blood did not help.

  “How’re Lucy and the babies?” she asked.

  “They’re fine, Marlene.” Tightly.

  “I need to go wash myself, Butch. And take a rest. I’ll be at Edie’s. Call me there.”

  “Is that guy still bothering her?”

  “Not lately. But he’s probably there.”

  “Who, Robinson? Where?”

  “On the island. Her sister has a house there and she parties with her pals, and he’s one of them.”

  “Oh, shit, Marlene!” A wail.

  “I’ll be fine, Butch. I have a gun and a big dog, and after tomorrow I’ll have Wolfe.”

  Another silence. When Karp spoke again it sounded as if he was struggling for control. “Let me understand this. You’re guarding her, he’s there, and clearly, you don’t expect him to hold off just because you are there, or else you wouldn’t be there, right out front. So … you expect him to try to get to her right through you. Is that what’s happening, Marlene?”

  “Yeah. I think he loves getting through opposition. It’s part of the thrill for him. He’ll make a move.”

  “That’s great,” Karp said. “Terrific! The guy’s a killer, Marlene.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, almost giddily, “so am I. Tell Lucy to call me at Edie’s tonight, okay? Bye, Butch.”

  As she hung up she was reflecting about what she had just said about opposition whetting the thrill for Robinson. It certainly fit with what she already knew about his personality, if that was the word. She thought that if stalking had an NFL, the late Manfred Stolz would be a lot lower draft choice than the Music Lover.

  NINETEEN

  They let Marlene take a shower in the hospital. She spent three-quarters of an hour in it, and washed and rinsed her hair thrice. When she emerged, she found that her bloody clothes had been removed and replaced with a blue T-shirt printed with a picture of Montauk Light, white jeans, and a bra and panties. Everything fit. Harry clearly, and Marlene smiled at the idea of Dead Harry Bellow buying undies in some tony Southhampton shop. Her bag, a zip-up canvas number, was there too, with Dane’s gun and holster in it. She picked it up and went to visit Wolfe.