Trap (9781476793177)
Page 29
Joining in the applause, Karp and Marlene turned to each other and smiled. “That’s our boy,” she whispered.
“Simply amazing,” he replied.
Rabbi Hamilburg appeared, clapping along with the others until he made a motion for everyone to sit back down. “I think we all agree that was truly beautiful,” he said. “Like listening to an angel. But we have one more presentation tonight, and so we must move on.”
Karp glanced at the eight boys sitting in a row, the first six thirteen years old and then the two largest on the end, Giancarlo, and next to him, Zak. His “oldest” son looked nervous, but determined. His brother had offered to go last, only half kidding when he teased “so you don’t have to follow me,” but Zak had insisted on having the last word.
As the rabbi asked Zak to come forward, Karp thought about the change that had come over his son since their conversation not quite a year earlier when Zak wasn’t sure about going through with his bar mitzvah. But a lot had changed since then.
After Stone’s meltdown during his cross-examination, Mendelbaum had beseeched the judge to take an early lunch break so that she could pull herself together for redirect. “She’s under a lot of stress,” he told the judge as if it wasn’t readily apparent.
Rainsford had looked at the witness, who was holding her head in both hands, and nodded. “We’ll see everyone back here at one p.m.”
The break served to calm Stone down. She now admitted that she’d carried on an affair with Salaam, but had been “too embarrassed to talk about my private life.” She maintained that she didn’t know about her lover’s “other life.”
The new attempt was so pathetic that Karp didn’t bother to ask her any more questions. He’d point out the charade in his summation.
Mendelbaum had done his best during his summation, though it was something of a potpourri he asked the jury to consider. The possibility that Lars Forsling committed the murder. “After all, the district attorney thought he was a viable suspect.” Or that Monroe and, possibly, Gallo, had conspired to kill Lubinsky. “It was the union that was being threatened by the charter school bill, not the Kings County District Attorney.” And even that Salaam had been acting alone “knowing that his friends—Monroe and Stone—were concerned about the charter school bill and took it upon himself to kill its champion.”
He noted that Stone had “laid herself bare” confessing to crimes, knowing it would cost her many years in prison and end her political aspirations. “But being a thief, an adulteress, and, quite frankly, a lousy district attorney who should have known better does not make her a murderer.”
However, Karp had quickly dispatched the “other scenarios” by pointing out that there wasn’t any evidence to back them up. “Only words, and words don’t mean much when stacked up against the facts,” he said. “Nor do the defendant’s words that she was merely a thief mean much when all she’s trying to do is avoid the full consequences of her actions.”
Karp had then proceeded to build his case one last time, only now fitting each piece of the mosaic together where it belonged in the structure and showing how they interrelated. And he did so recalling Dirty Warren’s movie trivia about John Quincy Adams’s admonition to tell the better story. “It’s a story,” he told the jurors, “about the corrupting nature of power and the lust for what it can give someone who lacks the moral character to do the right thing when faced with temptation. It’s a story with heroes like Rose Lubinsky, Goldie Sobelman, and even Micah Gallo, who turned back from the path he was on before it was too late. And there are villains—Lars Forsling, who showed us the dark side of hatred, and Yusef Salaam certainly. But also the people who used Salaam to their own ends.”
Karp had walked slowly along the rail and looked each juror in the eyes. “But it will be up to you to write the final chapter. It’s the chapter that you can go home and tell your friends, business colleagues, and family about when they ask you why you made the decision you did in this case. The chapter that says you examined the evidence and determined that the defendant was guilty of murder beyond any and all doubt. Only when you do that will this story come to a close. And that close occurs when the defendant understands that the trap she created for herself came about when she acted on the belief that she could steal, cheat, misappropriate, manipulate, and murder with impunity. By your verdict you will disabuse her of her delusional belief system.”
Karp now turned to deal with the dying declaration issue. “You heard during the defense’s summation, quite cleverly and ably explained by Mr. Mendelbaum, that his client is innocent and Lars Forsling is guilty because he said so as he lay dying. The trustworthiness of a dying declaration is based upon the notion of a shared value system of right and wrong, good and evil. The idea is that when facing death, God-fearing people will confess their sins. However, the more you heard about Mr. Lars Forsling from the witness Mr. LaFontaine, and what you heard and observed about Mr. LaFontaine, would it offend your common sense if I suggested to you that neither individual had a shared value system with us? And of course, given the context in which that statement by Mr. Forsling was made, the answer is they don’t.”
Karp then brought up what he called “the unholy alliance between the corrupt teachers federation administration and the public school system that it controlled. You heard the defendant in this case malign the charter schools by stating they are elitist and racist and basically private in nature. But like the rest of her testimony, of course, none of that is true. Rose Lubinsky on many occasions made it clear that charter schools are the salvation of children in inner cities, the minority neighborhoods of our town. Charter schools, she made clear, are public schools. They outperform substantially their failing and dangerous counterparts, the federation-controlled public schools. In order to ensure the expansion and continuation of the charter school movement, Rose Lubinsky had an important bill in the state assembly that this defendant and Monroe feared. And Rose Lubinsky was murdered because she was telling the truth about outstanding achievements of the charter schools, and threatened the power and the wealth of Monroe and Stone as well as the pathetically corrupt politicians they bought off to try and dissolve the charter school system at the expense of hundreds of thousands of children.”
The jury had returned with its verdict after only three hours of deliberations. The defendant Olivia Stone saw the decision on their faces when they walked back into the courtroom for the last time and collapsed into her seat. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stand when Judge Rainsford asked the foreman how the jury found as to the charge of murder. “Guilty,” he said over her sobs and pleas.
When it was over, the jury excused, the murderer led away to await sentencing, and the media had left the courtroom, Mendelbaum walked over to Karp and sighed. “I think it’s time to take the shingle down.”
“Why? You’re still sharp as ever,” Karp said. “The evidence was overwhelming, but you made us fight for it.”
“Thank you, my friend,” Mendelbaum said. “But it’s not just losing the case, or even feeling like a dinosaur around all this computer talk. I don’t know, the world has changed and I think not for the better. This one just left a bad taste in my mouth.”
“Well, take some time to think it over,” Karp said. “I’d miss doing battle with you.”
“You’d miss my Snickers bars, you mean,” the old man said, tossing one to Karp. “But I’m going to go visit my daughter and grandchildren down in Florida. Maybe I’ll just stay there. Either way I’ll let you know.”
In the fall, Karp had driven with Marlene and the boys to Albany for a session of the state assembly. There Micah Gallo revealed what Simon Lubinsky had passed to him from his wife. “It’s the speech she was going to give,” Gallo said, pulling the sheaf of papers from the manila envelope. “How she’d known I’d come around and give it for her, I don’t know. I guess she had more faith in me than I had in myself.”
“She was a great judge of character,” Simon said.
Gallo gave the speech and closed with “those are the words of Rose Lubinsky. I am just the messenger she chose and a poor one at that. I’m also a convicted felon, allowed out of prison for this purpose, and I’ll be returning for at least two more years. My sentence has been long and difficult, but it’s not as long and difficult as the sentence we are handing down to the children if we don’t seek every opportunity to improve the state of education. So I’m asking you to pass the Rose Lubinsky Charter School Fairness Act on their behalf.”
Gallo had received a standing ovation from the members of the state assembly. As he prepared to be driven back to a minimum security prison, he turned to shake Karp’s hand. “Thanks for the letter you sent the judge,” he said. “I think that’s the reason I got the minimum.”
“You did the right thing, Micah,” Karp said. “I was happy to do it. So, what do you plan on doing when you get out?”
Gallo shrugged. “I won’t be able to get back into teaching with a felony on my record. But maybe something with disadvantaged kids. Something that would make Rose proud.”
“I think she already is . . .”
A month later, Karp had felt his own sense of pride watching his sons at long last chant the words from the Torah and take that symbolic step into Jewish manhood. There’d remained just one more task and that was the special presentations each boy had been asked to do.
As expected, Giancarlo had sung beautifully. But Karp wondered when the rabbi asked Zak to step forward and his son sat still for a moment.
Then his son rose and walked to the spot where Rose Lubinsky had stood when she told the congregation her story. His head was down and he seemed to be searching for the words Karp had heard him practicing the night before. He looked up and found his parents in the audience, then Moishe and Goldie Sobelman, and finally Simon Lubinsky.
“I am a Jew and proud of it,” he said, and tapped his chest. “I feel it in here and I have my parents, my brother, and Rose Lubinsky to thank for it. Now let me tell you a story about two other Jewish heroes who made a difference in my life, Moishe and Goldie Sobelman . . .”
ROBERT K. TANENBAUM is one of the country’s most respected and successful trial lawyers, and has never lost a felony case. He has held such prestigious positions as Bureau Chief of the New York Criminal Courts and Chief of the Homicide Bureau for the New York County District Attorney’s Office. He was also Deputy Chief Counsel for the congressional committee investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For several years he taught Advanced Criminal Proce-dure at his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. His previous works include the novels Fatal Conceit, Tragic, Bad Faith, Outrage, Betrayed, and the true-crime book Echoes of My Soul.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: authors.simonandschuster.com/Robert-K-Tanenbaum
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ALSO BY ROBERT K. TANENBAUM
Fatal Conceit
Tragic
Bad Faith
Outrage
Betrayed
Capture
Escape
Malice
Counterplay
Fury
Hoax
Resolved
Absolute Rage
Enemy Within
True Justice
Act of Revenge
Reckless Endangerment
Irresistible Impulse
Falsely Accused
Corruption of Blood
Justice Denied
Material Witness
Reversible Error
Immoral Certainty
Depraved Indifference
No Lesser Plea
NONFICTION
Echoes of My Soul
The Piano Teacher: The True Story of a Psychotic Killer
Badge of the Assassin
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Robert K. Tanenbaum
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First Gallery Books hardcover edition August 2015
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Cover design and illustration by Jae Song
Author photograph by Blake Little
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tanenbaum, Robert.
Trap : a novel / Robert K. Tanenbaum. First Gallery Books hardcover edition.
pages ; cm
1. Karp, Butch (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Ciampi, Marlene (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.A52T74 2015
813'.54—dc23
2015015089
ISBN 978-1-4767-9316-0
ISBN 978-1-4767-9317-7 (ebook)