"It's a rough life," said Karp.
"Yes, I know. They're out there getting murdered, and my social role is to be protected and sheltered in the upper-middle-class cocoon, according to her, get good grades, have respectable middle-class friends, go to a good college, shop, chatter…"
"Lucy, when I rank sheltered middle-class girls, you are not in the top ten, I hate to tell you. You're not probably in the top million. I mean you've done your lower-depths adventure already, you've been shot at and kidnapped, and God knows what else. Don't you think it's time for a rest, maybe catch your breath a little?"
"No, I don't." Lucy sprang to her feet, a false and cheerful look on her face. "I should help set the table, shouldn't I?"
7
"Actually, it went a lot better than I expected, " said Karp. "A LOT better, for example, than this bagel." He was in a rear booth at Sam's, near the courthouse. Sam's was an antiquated joint of the type that used to be called a luncheonette in New York. It was dark and cozy, and the red leatherette of its booths was nearly black with age, except where patched with Mystik tape, and the air therein was dense with the scents of coffee, toast, bacon, and the extra something that once made all places smell exactly the same. He was having breakfast with his old pal, V. T. Newbury. Newbury worked in Washington now, for Treasury, doing something fairly cryptic about big-time money laundering. He had worked for Karp for over fifteen years at the DA, and whenever he was in town arresting distinguished bankers, he arranged to spend some time with Karp. Karp prized V.T.'s judgment, although not necessarily in reference to the doughy oval.
"What's wrong with it?" asked Newbury. He was a small, ridiculously handsome man with the chisel-cut features of a twenties cigarette-ad drawing. A scion of venerable New York wealth, he had nothing whatever in common with Karp, except deep mutual affection and a mordant sense of humor about the criminal justice system.
"It's not a bagel. It's white bread in a doughnut shape. An abomination. It's like… like…"
"Ladies no longer wearing gloves out of doors. Yes, the decline of a once great tradition. My commiserations. Tell me more about this fellow. Did you like him?"
"Well, sort of, as much as I could like someone with whom my daughter spends every available moment and who is ten years older than she is. He seemed pretty decent, and everyone was on their best behavior. Got a scruffy beard, dresses down-market, but clean. Well-spoken. He's from upstate somewhere. I guess he's the kind of guy, a woman sees him and wants to fatten him up or something. That kind of appeal. He's a Franciscan."
"A priest?"
"No, what they call a Tertiary, like a lay order. I didn't know they had them. He lives in a Catholic Worker hostel on the Lower East Side. According to him, he's been in some rough places. That was what we mainly talked about, Bosnia, Sudan. He's dying to get back there, if you can believe it. Like I said, everyone was being their charming selves, even Marlene. Their charming Catholic selves. Many references to the Holy Spirit.
"You felt left out.
"I did, a little. Off-base. I mean if your kid is hanging out with a bum, that's one thing. You can give him the bum's rush. If she's hanging out with… I don't know… a saint practically, what can you say? Be a little more evil, honey?"
"You're thinking maybe this guy is taking advantage of her?"
"What, sexually? Lucy?" Karp let his jaw drop. "You know, that's the one thing that never occurred to me. Never entered my mind."
"The dad is always the last to know."
"Uh-uh, that's not the worry with Lucy, especially not with this guy. The worry is we'll get a postcard from the Congo some day: 'Dear Mom and Dad, taking care of lepers in the middle of a guerrilla war here. Don't worry.'" Karp laughed. "Go have children! Now I know."
"I wish I could give you some advice," said V.T., "but, as you know, Anabel and I have not been blessed. I was always threatened with military school, myself."
"Not an option," said Karp, "although Marlene gets on a tear sometimes she's going to ship her out of town if she doesn't get her school act together." He pushed his half-eaten pseudo-bagel aside and signaled the waitress for more coffee. Newbury took the moment to examine his friend more closely. Not a happy man, he thought, and not because of his daughter either. The skin of his face had the stretched and sallow look that, experience taught, indicated tension and frustration. His smiles seemed forced, as if having to push up through a membrane of suffering.
"How's work?" Newbury asked in a casual tone.
"Oh, the usual. Putting asses in jail."
"Not. Really, what's wrong?"
"You got time for this?"
"Oh, a long story?"
"Semilong," said Karp, and plunged into the Cooley affair, and the situation with the election, and the execrable Norton Fuller, and what Karp proposed to do about it. At the end Karp asked, "So… what do you think?"
"I think you have a serious problem. Has Clay called you back yet?"
"Not yet, no."
"An interesting moral situation. Both of you want to stay in jobs where you think you can still do some good, and where the alternatives, like letting yet another incompetent bozo take your place, seem even worse. But you might have to ignore some bad stuff to keep in there, and then you have to ask, where do you draw the line? The old Schindler's list business, the good Germans…"
"That's hardly a fair comparison," said Karp. "Whatever happens, no one is sending me to Dachau."
"No, when you leave the DA, you'll be sentenced to private practice and the chance of enormous wealth, and this will keep you out of heaven. Some people, maybe including Lucy, would say that by comparison a jolt in Dachau is a day at the beach."
"You're not being very helpful," said Karp a little grumpily.
"No, and that's because this is the four hundred and twelfth time we've had this conversation, or a similar one. You're an essentially honest and decent man working at the top levels of a system that's essentially dishonest and indecent. You have authority enough to acquire responsibility, but not enough to change things much for the better. So your choices are, also for the four hundred and twelfth time, either, one, quit and earn an honest living; two, get off the pot and run for DA or political office, where you can put on your silver armor and fight the good fight with no holds barred; or, three, do a couple of ass-kissing favors for some pols and get appointed to the bench, where you can make the kind of law you want until senility takes hold, and even beyond. But this continual angst around a DA who doesn't want to play by your rules has not made you happy, is not making you happy, and will not make you happy in the future. Granted, Keegan is in a different moral universe from Bloom, but he's obviously still not pure enough for you, and so, until the second coming of Francis P. Garrahy, you're always going to be harassed by political types like Fuller. It's part of the system."
"I know it's the system, V.T. I wasn't asking for a review of my entire life, I was soliciting your advice as to how to carry out a sneak."
"Me being a sneaky guy? Thank you. Okay, here's my advice. It's a good plan as far as it goes. But if you're fighting a political battle, you're going to have to get your hands dirty in politics. You have to manipulate your boss into a position where it's less worse for him to do what you want him to do than what Fuller wants him to do."
"Oh, crap! If I do that, I'm as bad as Fuller!"
"Yes, and if you don't, you'll lose, so why bother in the first place? Sorry, pal, you asked me, and that's the way I see it." Newbury drained his coffee cup and looked at his watch. "I'd love to share some moral agony with you, but I'm due across the street to terrorize a clutch of certified public accountants. Is that the correct noun of venery? A slick of accountants? A cheat? Whatever." He shook Karp's hand warmly. "Love to the family. And, Butch? Lighten up… it's not like it was real life."
Karp watched his friend walk down Baxter Street and felt a stab of envy, not a very familiar stab, and more irritating for that. He did not, of course, envy Newbury's wealth or
family or status. What he wished he had was his light heart, his ability to accept the world as he found it, its infinite absurdities amusing, its injustices bearable, its corruptions a given, like the changes in season, without becoming nastily cynical or corrupt himself. As he walked back to the office, he tried unsuccessfully to wriggle out from under the opinions V.T. had laid out, and it must have shown on his face because those of his staff he encountered gave him serious nods in greeting, and the few smiles that dawned as he passed were stillborn. And that was another thing, which he hardly dared admit. He was lonely. Unlike the lost age when he had started at the DA, when a lawyer commonly spent a whole career in public prosecution, the present was an era of flux. Except for Roland Hrcany, and Keegan himself, everyone Karp had started with was gone. Keegan could not be a friend, of course, and as for Hrcany-as Roland himself often remarked, when you had a Hungarian for a friend, you didn't need any enemies. Karp stifled the self-pity, however, like the good stoic he was and stood nobly with his hand out in front of his secretary's desk while she slapped a short stack of early phone messages into his hand. "And Himself would like to see you when it's convenient."
"Himself, eh? What did His Excellency want?"
"He did not vouchsafe to me, Mr. Karp. But Mary said it was important… about a murder, she said. Mr. Hrcany is in there now. And the other one."
Which was Fuller. Fuller, inevitably, was the sort of little toad who puffed himself up by oppressing staff and was widely resented. This he took as a token of his effectiveness in administration.
Karp went into his private office and flipped through the pink squares. Only one was of immediate interest. He pushed the button.
"You found out something," he said when Clay Fulton picked up.
"Yeah. That incident we were discussing."
"Why did the chicken cross the road?"
"That one. I'm in the information business, so it was not unusual for me to ask for all the stolen-car reports put out on the evening in question and their time of transmission. Guess what I found out?"
"That the chicken crossed the road before the car in question was reported stolen," said Karp confidently.
"You got it."
"Which means that he crossed the road for some other reason, which means that he was pursuing the driver and not the car."
"I would say that's a reasonable assumption," said Fulton after a brief pause.
"What're we going to do?"
"You know, all in all, I think St. John's is going to whip Duke. A good big guy is going to take a good small guy every time."
"Not if the small guy is very fast and very sneaky."
"Nice talking to you, Stretch. If you take my meaning."
After he hung up, Karp had this thought: I'm becoming a pain in the ass to my friends. After taking some moments to recover from the irritation and anger this revelation occasioned, he grabbed one of his ledgers and walked to Keegan's office, remembering at the last moment to bring his face back to neutral. The DA was at the head of his conference table, flanked by Fuller and Hrcany. He looked pale, and there was a pinched expression on his face that Karp did not recall seeing there before. Fear? They all looked up when Karp entered and took the chair at the foot.
"What's up?" he asked, to which Keegan glowered, Roland rolled eyes upward, and Fuller said, "We have a problem."
"It's not a problem, Norton," Hrcany replied. "We call them cases. Somebody shoots somebody else, we investigate and come to a conclusion, and then we indict or don't indict the shooter."
This was Fuller's turn to roll his eyes.
Karp looked directly at Keegan. "Jack, what's going on?"
Keegan said, "A little while ago, I got a call from Shelly Solotoff. You remember Shelly, Butch?"
"Yeah, I had lunch with him last week."
"He's representing Sybil Marshak. Apparently, one day last week she shot a mugger in a garage midtown and fled the scene. She called Solotoff this morning, and he called me. We are now deciding how to handle this mess."
"What mess?" asked Karp disingenuously. "Roland just pointed out we have a procedure here. Why don't we follow it?"
"Oh, please!" snapped Fuller. "It's absurd to pretend Sybil Marshak is the same as some drugged-up kid with a gun."
"She's no kid," said Roland. "You got that right, Norton."
"But she had a gun," said Karp. "Drugs we don't know. Did Shelly say anything about drugs?"
"Very funny," said Fuller sourly. "But the press is going to be all over us in a very short time, and we need to get our ducks in a row. Obviously, we can stall for a little bit, feed them some junk about the continuing investigation, and no comment until the results are in, but afterward… I mean she is absolutely fucking key to the campaign. I mean she controls something over thirty percent of the typical primary vote in Manhattan-"
"And?" Karp interrupted.
Fuller was taken aback. "Well… clearly, we have to ensure that
… ah…" He hung up, fumfering.
"Yeah, it's hard to come right out and say it," Karp observed. "Because putting the screws to some poor schmuck for political reasons, that's business as usual. But easing off on someone for political reasons is a crime, isn't it?"
"Who said anything about easing off?" Fuller protested. "I never used any such language."
Karp ignored this, and turned to Hrcany. "We have some facts, I presume."
"Yeah, I talked to Jim Raney, at Midtown South. The vic is a homeless named Ramsey, Desmondo. A short sheet for dope possession and trespass. Nothing but jail time. No violence, no weapons charges. The body was found in a garage on Fifty-fifth off Broadway, dead a couple of hours when they found it. Anonymous call. Well, it being a homeless, they figured it for another one off that serial killer and shifted it to the task force that's running that thing, a detective Paradisio over at the One-seven, and it rattled around there for a while, until they decided it wasn't the same guy after all, and Ed Rastenberg, Paradisio's partner, shot it back to Midtown. So it's a little stale by now, but Raney goes into it, the usual, known associates, any enemies, and so forth. A blank. Okay, this is a bum, so we're not burning overtime here, but, to his credit, Raney persists, and he gets the idea of checking the cars in the garage where it took place. Turns out there's a video camera at the entrance that picks up the license plates pretty good, and he runs the plates of everyone whose car was in the garage at the time of or thereabouts. Not an easy job, but they did it. And they get a list of names and start calling, just fishing, really, did anyone see this guy, anything peculiar. Marshak was one of the ones got called."
Hrcany paused there, significantly.
"This was yesterday?" Karp asked.
"Yeah, and this morning she calls her lawyer and comes in. Doesn't look so good for Sybil. Leaving the scene. Lying low. Only gets a conscience when the cops are nosing around. Naughty, naughty Sybil, and her such a big liberal. Her story is she was in shock, post-traumatic stress, and she's very sorry."
"Raney interviewed her?" Karp asked.
"Yeah, with her attorney present, so he didn't get a hell of a lot. He says she says Ramsey came at her with a knife, and she plugged him. Calls it in to 911 later without giving a name, which checks out. But"-Hrcany paused significantly-"there was no knife recovered at the scene. There was a watch, though, a Lady Rolex, gold, in the vic's pocket."
"Marshak's watch," said Fuller. "That proves it. He ripped her off and she-"
"No," said Hrcany, grinning, "not Marshak's. She doesn't know anything about any watch. She said it was a knife he was flashing. But right now: knife, no; watch, yes.
"Witnesses?" asked Karp.
"As a matter of fact," Hrcany replied, "Marshak said she thought she did see another man hanging out in the background while Ramsey allegedly assaulted her. Another black guy; she said she'd recognize him again. The cops are looking, but"-he waved his hand dismissively- "basically, what we have here is woman shoots and kills unarmed man, and we have only her word th
at he threatened her. I think we can maintain man deuce, plus leaving the scene."
"Manslaughter two?" cried Fuller in outrage. "Are you crazy! Sybil Marshak? Christ, the woman'll be a hero to every woman who ever got accosted in a parking garage. And her word-hell, if you can't trust a woman like that, who the hell can you trust?"
Karp and Hrcany looked at each other. Hrcany's eyes almost vanished beneath their upper lids. The DA was examining the tip of his unlit cigar, as if the solution had been written there in tiny letters by a remarkably prescient Nicaraguan.
Hrcany said, "Okay, Norton, we'll let her off with a warning, and not only that, we'll sponsor a law. Any rich white bitch with a gun gets to kill one poor black guy and no hard feelings. Or maybe we should make it two, or three."
"Oh, get real, Roland!" Fuller snarled. "Why the hell shouldn't we take her word for it? It's not like she knew the guy, that she had something to gain from shooting him. What, you think she was a crazed racist? Marshak? The woman marched in Selma, for crying out loud! She's the biggest ACLU bleeding heart in the city. She had to be in legitimate fear of her life, or she never would've done it. I mean, if you can't see that…"
Karp noticed that Fuller got white when angry, while Hrcany got red, and wondered idly whether this meant anything about their characters. Hrcany was just beginning a sarcastic rant to the effect that people accused of crimes often took liberties with the truth, when Karp said, almost to himself, "She probably was in fear of her life. She thought she was being stalked."
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