Freeland took him through the usual background material, schools, profession, the fact that he was not a bodybuilder or involved in any athletics at present, and then on to the meat. Freeland had set up an experiment. He had taken Ashakian up to the stairway in 58 Barrow, and there Ashakian had propped up the skylight, jumped up, grabbed the lip of the skylight base, and chinned himself up to the roof. He testified that once up on the roof, he had observed numerous ways to leave the building.
Freeland asked, “Now, Mr. Ashakian, is there any doubt in your mind that a person of approximately your height and build could enter the skylight as you did and escape from the roof in any of the ways you have described?”
Karp objected. “Speculative.”
“Sustained.”
Freeland asked, “Well, then, did you yourself have any difficulty whatever pulling yourself up through the skylight to the roof?”
Ashakian said it had been easy.
Karp rose for cross. He had been about to ask that the entire testimony be stricken as speculative and irrelevant, but a memory flashed into his mind and he approached the witness.
“Mr. Ashakian, you testified that you attended St. Joseph’s High School. While there, did you participate in any sports?”
“Yes, I was on the gym team.”
“You started for the St. Joseph’s gymnastic team?”
“Yes.”
“And during that time, were you ever required to perform on the high bar?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Did that entail leaping up for a bar set nine feet above the ground, pulling yourself up so that your legs were on the bar, and rotating your whole body rapidly around the bar?”
“Yes, it did,” said Ashakian. To his credit, he seemed embarrassed.
“No further questions,” said Karp.
Freeland’s second witness was a thin, elderly man named Walter Tyler. Tyler testified that he had been walking down Hudson Street and that he had seen Susan Weiner stagger, bleeding, out of her doorway and a man running away from that scene. The man had glanced over his shoulder as he ran, and Tyler had seen his “full face.” The running man had not been Hosie Russell.
Tyler testified further that he had gone with the crowd to 58 Barrow, had shouted out that Russell was not the right man, and had been ignored. Later he had gone up to a cop and had given his story, which the cop had written down. When he saw that the police were continuing to charge Russell, he had gone to Freeland. Karp looked over at the jury. They were listening with interest. Wrinkles of doubt appeared on their faces. They had all watched enough Perry Mason to believe that the defense could pull in a secret witness at the last moment to overturn the prosecution’s carefully constructed case. Disaster loomed.
Marlene, dressed in her best black, perfumed heavily, attempting to radiate class, sat in an uncomfortable Louis XV chair in Stephan Sokoloff’s cozy office and looked at Aziz Nassif, who was sitting in a similar chair. Sokoloff sat behind his desk smiling genially upon the supposed transaction taking place. On the desk, on a tray covered in black velvet, were four coins.
“Thirty thousand for the four,” said Marlene. “It’s my best offer.”
Nassif licked his lips, hesitated, then nodded. Sokoloff’s smile broadened. He said, “I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a bill of sale. I’ll just write in the price, here, and Mr. Nassif, if you’d just sign it …”
Nassif read the document and scratched his name on the appropriate line. Marlene took it, folded it, and put it in her bag. The door to the office opened. Ramon Rodriguez and Harry Bello walked in and arrested Nassif for art fraud.
Rodriguez took the protesting Turk away. Marlene pulled a paper out of her bag and gave it to Bello.
“Okay, Harry, this is a search warrant for Nassif’s restaurant and his apartment. It’s for the art fraud charge. You’re looking for phony art objects or other evidence of fraud. Just like it says on the warrant. Of course, if you should happen to find any evidence of other crimes not named in plain sight, then you can seize that too.”
Harry raised an eyebrow. “Smart.”
“I thought so,” said Marlene.
Karp stood and addressed the bench. “Your Honor, since this witness was not known to us before now, I request that Mr. Freeland turn over to the People all notes and statements pertaining to Mr. Tyler.”
Freeland rose instantly and said, “Your Honor, the only records I have from this witness are personal notes, personal working notes, which I don’t believe I am under any obligation to turn over.”
Martino beckoned them to the bench. He addressed Freeland.
“You have no statement from this man?”
“No, sir.”
“No statements? You interviewed this witness without taking notes about what he told you?”
Freeland said, “Well, yes, but they’re just rough notes-”
“That’s what I want,” said Karp.
“I don’t have to give them,” said Freeland, petulance creeping into his tone.
The judge said, “You have all Mr. Karp’s material, notes, police reports, statements from witnesses….”
“That was Mr. Karp’s option in that he thought those materials fell under Rosario, which he was obligated to give up. I am under no such obligation.”
“I am directing you to turn them over.”
“Your Honor, I’d like to know under what rule of discovery, or case you are directing me to.”
Martino squinted his eyes in thought. “Rule of discovery, it’s … what?” He glanced at Karp.
“Dolan, Your Honor,” said Karp.
“Right, Dolan. That’s Dolan, Mr. Freeland: D-O-L-A-N.”
“I’m not familiar with that case, Judge.”
“Not my problem, Mr. Freeland. I’m going to recess now for five minutes, during which you can peruse the law, and during which you will turn that material over to the People.”
It was as Karp had expected. Eight sheets of yellow paper covered with scribbling that contained almost none of the testimony that Tyler had just given, except for his insistence that the man who had committed the crime had worn a blue shirt. The actuality was easy to reconstruct. An elderly man had seen something dramatic, a murder. He’d seen a figure race away. He’d followed the crowd to 58 Barrow. When the cops dragged out a man wearing a red T-shirt, he’d called out, “That’s not the guy.” Somehow Freeland had located him, or he had drifted in to Freeland, and the original story had been fertilized by suggestion and encouragement and the desire to be important, and Freeland’s unprincipled ambition, until the current testimony had appeared, like a gross and noxious weed. Perjury.
“Mr. Tyler,” said Karp, “could you stand up and come down here where I am?” As Tyler did so, Karp continued, “Your Honor, could we have Mr. Tyler demonstrate for the jury how the man was running and how he turned his head?”
The judge assented.
“Mr. Tyler,” Karp continued, “now, this man you saw, was he running fast or slow?”
“He was running fast.”
“All right, could you do that, could you just run away from the jury box and show the jury how the man was running and how he turned his head?”
Tyler broke into a clumsy trot across the well of the court and, after a few steps, threw his head back over his shoulder, then continued on for a few more steps. It was a good demonstration that if a man is running away from you and he looks over his shoulder, you can’t see his full face.
Karp said, “Now could you tell us exactly how far this man was away from you when he turned his head?”
“Thirty feet. I said thirty feet.”
On his crutches Karp backed slowly away from Tyler. He stopped at the rail dividing the well from the spectators. “About here?”
“No, farther than that.”
Karp opened the little gate and moved up the aisle. “Here?”
“Yeah, that’s good,” said Tyler.
Karp turned his back on the witness. “Mr
. Tyler, can you see my back?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Tyler, you see that I can’t run very well now, but I’m going to look over my right shoulder at you. Was this how the man on Hudson Street looked over his shoulder?”
“Yeah, like that.”
“Mr. Tyler, can you see my full face?”
A pause. “Well, it wasn’t just like that … he sort of stopped a little.”
“Answer the question,” said Martino.
“No, I can’t.”
“And it follows that on Hudson Street that day, you couldn’t really see the full face of the man you saw running away, isn’t that true?”
“Yes.”
“So what you actually saw that day was a portion of a man’s face at a distance of perhaps thirty feet for about one second, isn’t that true?”
Tyler agreed that it was.
Karp said, “Mr. Tyler, when Mr. Freeland first interviewed you, didn’t you say that you were forty-five feet away from the man when he turned?”
“No, thirty feet.”
“But Mr. Freeland’s notes, which I have here and which I now submit in evidence, state clearly forty-five feet. Is this the incredible shrinking distance?”
“Objection!” from Freeland.
“Withdrawn. Did you say you were forty-five feet away from the over-the-shoulder glance when you first spoke to Mr. Freeland?”
“Objection! These are personal notes. What I wrote down there may or may not be what Mr. Tyler told me, and they shouldn’t be used to cross-examine the witness.”
There was a moment of stunned silence, and the judge gave Freeland one of his long looks. “Mr. Freeland, are you stating that Mr. Tyler did not just testify to the same facts that he told you originally, or that you didn’t write down what he said then correctly?”
“Uh, no, Your Honor, I was not saying that.”
The judged turned to Tyler. “Answer the question.”
“It was thirty feet.”
Karp then questioned him about the cop who had purportedly interviewed him. Tyler couldn’t remember the cop’s name or give a convincing description of him, or explain why he hadn’t gone to the police, or the D.A. or a judge with his testimony. Karp dismissed the witness, feeling confident that he had creamed him pretty well. Freeland declined to recross, which was a good sign.
“Defense calls Geri Stone.”
It took Karp a moment to comprehend who Geri Stone was. When he did, he rose and said, “Offer of proof on this witness, Your Honor?”
Freeland said, “This witness was the defendant’s parole officer. She knows the defendant quite well and was in fact instrumental in obtaining his release from prison. She will testify as to the defendant’s propensity for committing this type of crime.”
“Approach the bench, Your Honor?” said Karp.
Martino beckoned them forward.
“Your Honor, this witness is the dead woman’s sister. It strikes me as … obscene, to trot her in here as a character witness for the defendant.”
“She’s an expert, not a character witness,” Freeland retorted, “and her relation to the deceased has no legal bearing on her suitability as a witness.”
Martino looked at the two counsel bleakly. He had seen it all, and it hadn’t improved his view of human nature or the imperfections of the law. “I’ll allow the witness.”
Karp protested, “As an expert only?”
“Yes, as to her expertise.” To the court officer: “Swear her in.”
The Sister was no longer in black. She wore a blue linen suit over a white blouse with a complicated scarf at the neck. She was heavily made up, and her hair had been recently done over with reddish highlights. She looked like a waxwork in the bureaucrats’ hall of fame.
Freeland took her through her professional qualifications and her relationship with the defendant. Then they began on what a swell guy Hosie Russell was. Freeland read copiously from the parole officer’s notes Stone had written, how Hosie was the victim of society and his own weaknesses, how he had tried so hard and, more to the point, how she believed that he was basically nonviolent, a disorganized, dissociated alcoholic, a sneak thief, not an armed robber. Stone confirmed her agreement with these opinions, her voice a low monotone.
Karp waited for the payoff, and he was not disappointed.
“Ms. Stone,” Freeland asked smoothly, “have you or a member of your family ever been a victim of a violent crime?”
“Yes, my sister is the victim in this case.”
“Objection!” cried Karp. “Irrelevant to the expert testimony.”
“Sustained. The jury will disregard.”
The damage, of course, was done. If Karp now tore Ms. Stone apart on the stand, tore apart the victim’s sister, the jury would never forgive him. They would walk Jack the Ripper.
Freeland said, “No further questions.”
Karp stood and said, “No questions, Your Honor.”
Martino said, “Members of the jury, that completes the testimony in this case. All that remains are the summations by the respective counsel, after which the court will charge. Have a pleasant evening and do not discuss the case among yourselves.”
The courtroom emptied. Karp gathered his papers.
“Need a hand?” It was Marlene.
“A leg, you mean.”
“How’d it go?”
“Were you here?”
“No, I just came in. What happened?”
“Oh, nothing, just fucking Freeland called Geri Stone.”
“As a defense witness?”
“Yep. As the parole officer, to the effect that Hosie was God’s gift to New York. And she did it. She sat up there and mouthed that crap about the guy who knifed her sister. I can’t understand it. I mean, I could understand Freeland doing it-it’s brilliant in a filthy way. Getting the vic’s sister to stand up for the mutt charged, and of course he slipped it in that she was the sister. But I can’t see why she would agree to it.”
“Oh, I can,” said Marlene. “I mean, what else does she have anymore? She loved her sister and, God help us all, she loved her work. She thought she was doing good. She got Russell out on the street and he did her sister, what’s she going to do-admit she made a mistake, that her whole approach to life is fucked? That this mutt she made a pet of and patronized and manipulated was really manipulating her? No way.”
Karp sighed. “You think so? Maybe. It’s hard to believe, though. I mean, we’re not that crazy-about all this, I mean.” He gestured wildly at the courtroom, taking in the legal profession and the law’s grim majesty.
“Speak for yourself, dear,” said Marlene unhelpfully.
18
This is getting boring,” said Roland, sitting down at the long table in Karp’s office. The same gang sat around the periphery, called together after the day’s work by Karp in response to what Marlene had told him after court.
“We’ll try to make it interesting for you, Roland,” said Karp. “We’ve had a break in the case. Marlene?”
Marlene said, “Yeah, well, what happened is that Aziz Nassif tried to move some funny coins to Sokoloff. We just arrested him. Harry here has just completed a warranted search of his restaurant and apartment-”
“A warrant?” Roland interrupted. His voice rose. “A warrant for the Ersoy killing?”
“No, of course, not, Roland,” answered Marlene sweetly. “We would never do anything like that. How would it look if we went after a warrant for a crime in which we already had an indicted suspect? The defense would eat you up. No, the warrant was for the fraud. But, of course, objects in plain view associated with any other crimes are subject to warrantless seizure-”
“I know the doctrine, Marlene,” said Roland sourly. “What’d he find?”
“Harry?” said Marlene.
Harry Bello reached into his cheap vinyl briefcase and pulled out several clear plastic evidence bags. “One, a ski mask. Matches the description given by the witnesses at the scene. Two,
blue parka with red stripes, the same. Three, box of nine-mm Parabellum pistol ammo, half empty. A clip from a nine-mm pistol, empty. Ballistics says it’s from a Kirrikale, a copy of a German gun made in Turkey.”
“Not the gun itself?” asked Roland.
“No gun,” said Bello, and continued with his inventory: “Four, a rental agreement from a National car rental in Maspeth for a ’78 Ford Fairlane two-door, blue. The make and model identified at the scene. Rented March 12, returned March 13, the day of the murder, two hours later than the hit. Fifth and last, a card showing rental rates from a mini-storage locker at Boulevard Storage, also in Maspeth. I called them. They have a hundred-square-footer rented to Ahmet Djelal. That’s it.”
Everyone looked at Roland, who sat, working his jaw, saying nothing, as the seconds passed heavily by. Finally he observed, “You don’t have much. No gun. The mask and parka don’t mean a lot. Same with the car. And I thought Nassif had an alibi.”
“Yeah, from the workers in his restaurant, who’re scared shitless of him,” said Bello. “They won’t hold up once we start pushing, start yanking their phony green cards around.”
Some more silence. Everybody there knew that Roland’s case against Tomasian was not that much more impressive than the case against Nassif. At last Karp spoke up. “Guma, what’s the story on the tap?”
“The deal is still set for Thursday, day after tomorrow,” Guma replied. “Aside from that, nothing new.”
“Why don’t we give them something new? Goom, do you think you could arrange to have Joey Castles learn that we picked up Nassif for fraud? If it comes through in the phone tap, then at least we’ll know that we’re talking about the same Turks.”
“I think I could arrange it,” said Guma.
“Do that. The next thing to do is to talk to Nassif. We’ve got him next door. V.T.? And …” Karp paused and looked at Roland. It was the critical moment, akin to the first time you sit down in a divorce lawyer’s office with your erstwhile sweetie. Roland had every right to interrogate Nassif. It was his case, and he was arguably the best interrogator in the office. The question was, would he?
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