Falsely Accused

by Robert Tanenbaum

  In this office, in a cherrywood-furnished room on the nineteenth floor, Karp worked, not happily, but well and lucratively. He was making more money than he ever had in his life, except during the six weeks he had spent as the twelfth man on an NBA basketball team, investigating a murder and getting paid to play the game.

  Karp was unhappy because he had in his life found only two things that he could do a lot better than most people and that he genuinely enjoyed doing: playing basketball and prosecuting criminals, and fate had dealt him a hand that prevented him from doing either. It was basketball, however, that had, in an indirect way, landed him his present job. He had been shooting baskets one Saturday at the Fourth Street courts in the Village, and a slight man with a friz of ginger hair around his bald pate had approached him on the asphalt with a “you won’t remember me” and a look of something close to worship on his thin face. It was certainly true that Karp didn’t remember him, but Steve Orenstein remembered Karp. Orenstein had spent one season warming the bench on the suburban high school team of which the young Karp had been the chief ornament. That morning they played an easy game of horse while chatting and discovered that Orenstein was working at Bohm Landsdorff Weller, or B.L., as he called it, and that Karp was at liberty. Orenstein asked whether Karp had ever thought of going into civil litigation, to which Karp had frankly replied that it had never once crossed his mind, and Orenstein had mentioned that if it ever did happen to cross, his firm was badly in need of someone who knew what to do in a courtroom. Two weeks after that, Karp, bored with unemployment and stony broke, had come by for an interview and been snapped up.

  At B.L., Karp found that he was as much a specialist as the little men that NFL teams hire to kick field goals. Most lawyers of the type that populate downtown law firms never come anywhere near a trial. There are quite distinguished and successful lawyers in that milieu who have never once argued a case before a jury during a long career. Among such lawyers, therefore, trials signify a breakdown of the gentlemanly process of negotiation whose aim is settlement out of court, during which agreeably long process both sets of clients can be gently fleeced and neither law firm embarrassed by the possibility of a public defeat. But this glowing surface of collegiality is, of course, underpinned by the grim cast-iron structure of the trial system, and so it is necessary for the firm to have at its disposal at least one litigator who is not strictly speaking a gentleperson at all, and who, it may be given out along Wall and William and Pine streets, is kept chained in a tower room and fed raw meat against the day on which he will be unleashed against the firm’s rivals in an actual courtroom, to raven and destroy. At B.L., this was Karp.

  Karp had tried but one case in the sixteen months he had been at B.L. This was an affair in which an investment house had run an initial public offering of stock in a technology firm known to have a set of potentially lucrative patents. It turned out that the firm did not quite have all the said patents and that the ones they did have were not quite as succulent as advertised. The investors cried foul when later the stock prices went into the toilet; the investment house claimed breaks of the market. B.L.’s negotiators offered an out-of-court settlement—restitution plus interest. When the investment house declined this civilized deal, B.L.’s people sighed and rolled out Karp. Six months later, he had won not only restitution plus interest but a punitive award, of 4.3 million dollars. It turned out that the investment house had known all about the defective patents before offering the stock. A criminal fraud case was pending, and the head of the investment house, whom Karp had treated, during a hideous day and a half on the witness stand, to the sort of cross-examination usually reserved for members of the unmanicured classes, was resting in a convalescent home.

  Since then it had not been necessary to use Karp again. He kept busy, however, keeping track of a variety of cases where the threat to go to trial was a useful ploy, much as the men who, in those waning days of the 1970s, sat in North Dakota missile silos and practiced the annihilation of Kiev.

  The major on-deck case at the moment was Lindsay et al. v. Goldsboro Pharmaceutical Supply Company, a cat’s cradle involving tainted insulin, three multinational drug companies, the largest insurer in the nation, eight thousand or so aggrieved diabetics, their families, heirs, and assigns, and approximately 1.6 billion dollars in claims and counterclaims. Karp had mastered the case with a speed that amazed his colleagues and had expressed confidence that, should the elaborate negotiations then ongoing break down, he was prepared to try the case and win. Nobody at B.L. wanted that to happen, least of all Karp. Such a trial could take three to five years, and he preferred the challenge of the new. When he had been in charge of the Homicide Bureau, he might, during an average killing year, have been involved in several hundred trials and might have actually prosecuted as many as twenty.

  Being a sort of utility for B.L., Karp was considered part of the overhead and was not expected to drum up business. Nor did he. Thus he was startled when Murray Selig called him on the phone to say he needed a lawyer. After recovering from his amazement, Karp was actually pleased, and told Selig to come by and chat.

  Selig came in the next morning. Karp rose from behind his desk and greeted him warmly and invited him to sit. Selig was glad to do so. Like many men of less than moderate size, he was made uneasy on a visceral level by males the size of Karp. Karp was a little taller than six foot five, with big shoulders and long arms and legs and first baseman’s mitt-sized hands. The two men made small talk for a few minutes—sports, their families, mutual friends. They had any number of these, since Selig had worked closely with Karp on dozens of cases when Karp had been with the D.A. and Selig was an assistant C.M.E. During this time Selig took the opportunity to focus his keen observer’s skills on the figure of his interlocutor.

  Karp had cut his crisp brown hair shorter since D.C., and Selig noted with rue that it did not seem to be climbing back along his forehead with the velocity to be expected in a man past thirty-five. Underneath the forehead was a nose that had started out as something of a beak, but Selig’s practiced eye estimated that it had been broken at least twice. It now resembled several small potatoes in a sock. The face had in general an odd, nearly oriental cast—high cheekbones and eyes set aslant in their deep sockets. The skin was rough and yellowish. If Karp had been dead on a slab, Selig might almost have called him a central Asian.

  Selig began now to recite the reason for his visit. Karp’s eyes fixed on him as he spoke, which the doctor found unsettling. Officially hazel, Karp’s eyes had yellow flecks in them that seemed to glitter, like those of a feral animal. Selig thought that it would not be much fun trying to slip a lie past those eyes.

  Selig came to the crux of his story, the two letters of complaint on which his dismissal had been based, and Karp stopped him.

  “You have copies of those letters, Murray?” Selig did and handed them across the desk. Karp read through them quickly. “Any of this crap true?” he asked. “For example, did you actually say that this purported rape victim might have inserted snails in her vagina?”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, of course I didn’t say that,” Selig cried. “The thing happened in People v. Lotz. That was when you were in D.C. Lotz was a junkie burglar who broke into an apartment in Peter Cooper. He thought it was empty, but the tenant was at home. A woman named May Ettering. Lotz panicked and strangled her. They caught him about ten hours later buying stuff on her credit cards. Not exactly a rocket scientist, Lotz. So they had a good circumstantial case, but this kid D.A., Warneke, wanted to make it even better by making it out that Lotz was a rapist besides being a strangler and a burglar.”

  “Was he?”

  “I didn’t think so. The serology from the vaginal sample of the victim contained acid phosphatase, and since semen contains acid phosphatase, Warneke wanted me to say that evidence of sexual intercourse was present. But I pointed out to him that there are any number of food substances that contain it. Broccoli and cabbage, for example.”
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br />   “And snails.”

  “And snails. I also pointed out to Warneke that Ettering had an intact hymen. She was a virgin. That usually rules out rape. Bloom claims in his letter that Warneke told him I had flippantly remarked in a conference about the case that the victim might have put snails up her vagina and that this could account for the phosphatase. Which is complete horse manure.”

  Karp made a note. “There were other people at this meeting?”

  “At least half a dozen.”

  “Good. What about this one on our late vice-president? Did you really stand up in front of grand rounds at Metropolitan Hospital and tell the folks that the great man had expired porking someone?”

  “Oh, God, no! I just did my usual dog and pony about the evolution of the M.E.’s office, and at the part where I say that one of the problems of the job is doing autopsies of notable people, I may have mentioned him. He’d died a couple of days before the presentation.”

  “But no death in the saddle?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Wise. I expect we can corral enough distinguished physicians who were at the meeting to confirm it. In fact, when shown false, the charge is so infamous that it’ll help with damages.”

  Selig suddenly realized the import of this remark. “You’re taking the case?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Karp. “You’ll make an appointment, and we’ll go over this stuff line by line.”

  Karp shifted his swivel chair so that it faced the window and fell silent. He seemed deep in thought. After a minute or so, Selig cleared his throat and asked, “So—you think we have a good case?”

  “Oh, no question. I’m a little rusty on employment law, but I’m certain that a public official can’t be fired for cause without some sort of hearing.”

  “The Mayor claims I’m—I was—a political appointee serving at his pleasure.”

  Karp shook his head dismissively. “That’s something we’ll duke out. Even if they could fire you, I’m almost sure they can’t fire you for cause without giving you a hearing. It’s not a Roth case. God, I can’t believe I remembered that!”

  “Who’s Roth?”

  “Teacher at Wisconsin, early seventies. Untenured. The school didn’t renew his contract, and he sued. He claimed that they didn’t renew because he’d pissed off the university authorities by criticizing the administration. Defendants came back with the argument that they didn’t have to give any reason at all for not renewing, and the Supreme Court agreed.”

  “This is good for us?”

  “Yeah. The Supremes decided he didn’t have what they call a property interest in his job, because they didn’t fire him, they just declined to rehire him. You did have such an interest. Also, and probably more significantly for our purposes, when they declined to rehire Roth, they made no statement that would impugn his good name and prevent him from getting a job elsewhere. And from what you tell me, the press conference and all, that’s very far from your case. They canned you for cause, and went public that they thought you were a bum. They can’t do that, not without giving you the right of rebuttal. We can work a little deprivation of liberty action in here too.”

  To Selig’s questioning look Karp added, “Liberty. Under Fourteenth Amendment case law, liberty includes the right to seek your customary employment. By maligning you without due process, they’ve limited your liberty in that way.” Karp stared out the window again.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Selig when the waiting became too much for him.

  Karp spun his chair slowly around until he faced Selig. “What I’m thinking is, why? Bloom doesn’t like to make waves. He made plenty over you. And he must have used some pretty big chips with the Mayor to get you out of the C.M.E.’s slot.”

  “Naomi said it’s because he’s a controlling asshole.”

  “That’s true enough, but …”—Karp flipped the copies of the complaint letters on his desk—“this crap, this snails nonsense, isn’t enough to warrant the hatchet job Bloom did on you.”

  “The reason’s important?”

  “Oh, yeah. I think in a way it’s the key to the case. Not the case we’ll argue in court, necessarily.”

  Karp fell again into a silent study, and Selig, starting to become irritated with what seemed to him vagueness, changed the subject.

  “So. What do you think this is going to cost me?”

  Karp regarded him blankly. “Hmm? I don’t know, Murray. Don’t worry about it. We’ll win, you’ll make money.”

  “But if we don’t win,” Selig persisted.

  Something hard congealed in Karp’s yellowish gaze. “Murray, I said, don’t worry about it. I’m taking the case.”

  “But …”

  “Murray,” said Karp with finality. “I’ll pay you.”

  TWO

  Two women, one very tall, one of ordinary size, both dressed in silk kimonos, sat talking and drinking champagne on a bed in a loft on Crosby Street in lower Manhattan. They were wearing the gowns because they had been caught unprepared in a summer downpour and were being languorous before getting dressed again in dry clothes. The tall one was the freelance journalist whose peculiar name Naomi Selig had tried vainly to recall the previous evening, Ariadne Stupenagel. She was, to look at, quite as odd as her name. Over six feet tall and leggy, with broad mannish shoulders and wide womanly hips, Stupenagel had facial features in proportion. Her mouth was wide and lippy, her jaw strong, her nose generous. Her eyes, dark, knowing, heavily mascaraed and shadowed green-blue, looked as large as a pony’s. She wore her dust blond hair piled up on top of her head in the manner of Toulouse-Lautrec’s barmaids, which added another several inches to her height. If not beautiful in the conventional sense, she was hard to miss and memorable.

  Marlene Ciampi, her hostess, was, in contrast, beautiful in the conventional sense, looking, as an artist friend of hers had once noted, exactly like Bernini’s statue of St. Teresa in Ecstasy. St. Teresa was not, however, a smart kid from Queens with adorable black ringlets and a glass eye.

  The meeting was in the nature of a reunion. Stupenagel had just returned to New York from a year covering the guerilla war in Guatemala. The two women were at the point of drunkenness in which confidences may begin to flow, and everything seems vastly funny.

  “I can’t get over what you’ve done with the loft,” said Stupenagel, refilling her glass. “It must have cost a fortune.”

  “Yes, it did,” agreed Marlene, gazing contentedly out the open door of the bedroom at her remarkable dwelling. She had lived in this place since the days in which it was illegal to do so. She had with her own hands ripped out the ruins of an old electroplating factory and installed simple plumbing, electricity, heating, and cabinetwork. Necessarily, this had been crude work; as a junior assistant D.A., she’d had little cash to spare on comforts, although the mere size of the space—a hundred feet by thirty-three—made up for a lot. Nevertheless, she had lived ten years in what was little more than a shabbily furnished nineteenth-century factory: rusty tin ceiling, the floor of splintery planks where it was not concrete slab, tepid radiators, a tiny, fetid toilet, raw drywall partitions instead of proper rooms.

  Now, however, she looked out on an expanse of satiny Swedish-finished oak flooring, glowing under the track lighting that hung from the smooth dropped ceiling. She had real rooms with doors and brass hardware. The creaky inconvenient sleeping loft was now a handsome bedroom, w/bath. The kitchen was right out of Architectural Digest, oak cabinets, a double stainless reefer, a Vulcan stove. Lucy, the Karps’ seven-year-old daughter, had a cozy, carpeted bedroom and a well-stocked playroom. The stingy gas radiators were gone, and the whole vast space was heated and cooled in season by a climate control center that had its own little lair in a corner of the loft.

  “Luckily,” continued Marlene, “we had a fortune. Last year Butch made about twice the combined total of what our two salaries were when we both worked for the D.A. It was like Monopoly money; we couldn’t believe the numbers.
Especially coming from D.C., where we were practically sharecroppers. So we figured while we were flush, and who knew how long it’d last, we’d better fix up the place. And there it is.”

  Sounds of giggling floated through the open door. Lucy was entertaining a friend.

  “Why wouldn’t it last?” asked Stupenagel.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” replied Marlene. “It doesn’t seem right, somehow. All that dough. And Butch is not a happy camper, not really. He was born to put asses in jail. One day he’s going to come home and tell me he’s quit Bohm Lansdorff What’s-his-face and gone for a job with the Brooklyn D.A. or the Feds, and it’ll be back to genteel poverty and the joys of public service. Meanwhile, hi-ho!” She poured herself another glass of Moët.

  “Why doesn’t he just get his old job back?” asked Stupenagel. “Assuming he wants to be a D.A.”

  “Long story,” said Marlene dismissively.

  “Mmm,” said Stupenagel, for whom no story was too long, and shot Marlene an interested look. When this prompted no revelation, she changed tack. “Well, you certainly seem to have taken to the life of a bourgeois matron,” she observed in a needling tone. “I never would have thought it, the way you used to carry on at Smith. Little Ms. Feminist—”

  “Fuck you, Stupe,” replied Marlene amiably.

  “Supported by a man. Dependent. Want to go shopping? We could buy slipcovers. We could play mah-jongg—”

  “We could strike one another over the head with empty champagne bottles, me first.”