Falsely Accused

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “That’s the one.”

  Marlene looked puzzled. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Murray solve that case? He was the one who redid the autopsy and showed that the guy who confessed really did it.”

  “Uh-huh. Girton walked into a precinct in tears and confessed that he murdered his lover. The cops looked it up and found that the M.E.’s office had declared it a suicide and kicked the guy out. He kept coming back, and they kept giving him the boot, until the one detective they had there who wasn’t brain-damaged figured there might be something in it and called Selig. Selig had the vic dug up and re-autopsied him and sure enough, the guy’d been strangled manually. Girton went with a plea of temporary insanity. I have his lawyer scheduled to testify that if not for Dr. Selig’s skills, the case never would have been made.”

  Marlene laughed. “And they’re dragging this out to demonstrate Selig’s incompetence?”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Karp. “It’s like the rest of it—makes no sense. The thrashing of wounded beasts. Anyway, a week, ten days from now, I’ll have Bloom up on the stand. Then we’ll see.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Speaking of faked suicides, I need to get going on those kids who died in jail, but I’m not sure how to start. For sure I can’t involve Stupenagel.”

  “Why not?” asked Marlene, although she well knew.

  “Because if somebody went up and told her that the suicides were faked, she’d want to know how they knew, and that would lead to knowing that my plaintiff conducted an unofficial and probably not strictly lawful study in this very joint where we’re sitting, which would be splashed all over the press in the middle of the trial in which we’re painting him as the picture of probity, and that—” He stopped and looked at his wife’s face. “Oh, shit, Marlene! Tell me you didn’t tell her!”

  “I didn’t! She asked me about the autopsy records she asked me to get, and I had to tell her something or she would’ve tried to get them some other way and found out that we already had them. She guessed the rest. Don’t look at me that way! It’s her job and she’s good at it.”

  Karp groaned and threw his head back against the sofa. “She’s going to print this, right? When?”

  “She’s not going to print it. She said she’d hold off if I got the whole story and gave her the exclusive.” She summarized the heated discussion she had had with Stupenagel at the hospital. Karp listened patiently until Marlene got to the reporter’s suggestion that the Mayor might be involved in the cover-up.

  “Oh, horseshit! It’s Bloom.”

  “I’m just saying what she said.”

  “Don’t tell me you agree with her?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said it was a possibility. There was once a pretty good A.D.A. who used to say, ‘Don’t fall in love with your theory of the case.’”

  It was, in fact, one of Karp’s sacred maxims. He thought for a while and then announced, “Okay, fair’s fair. I’ll check it out. So, are you going to pursue this for us?”

  “Us?”

  “Yeah. You’re a P.I., remember? I’ll put you on the payroll. That way, anything you find out will be protected by confidentiality of counsel.” He saw her hesitation and added vehemently, “Come on, Marlene! Otherwise it’ll be a pain in the ass—we’re working on the same case and keeping secrets from each other? It’s not like we’re in an office and I’m your boss. Besides, if you don’t do it, I’ll have to bring in somebody fresh who doesn’t know the players and has half your brains and Stupenagel will get impatient and blow us out of the water.”

  After a brief but uncomfortable silence, Marlene nodded and said, “Okay, but no kibitzing! I run the investigation my way, me and Harry, and we tell you what we find.”

  “No problem,” replied Karp sincerely.

  “Okay. Let’s start with where we are now. Paul Jackson is the obvious suspect. I.A.D. isn’t investigating him actively because there’s supposedly a hold on Jackson coming down from the D.A.’s, because of some big joint corruption investigation, but I talked to Guma and he says Fred Spicer says there’s no investigation, which means …” She paused and stared at Karp. “What the hell does it mean?”

  “It means that Bloom is generating the heaviest possible cover for Detective Jackson, and he’s doing it directly, without involving his official people. God! What in hell could the little fucker have done?”

  “Him or the Mayor; Bloom could be covering something the Mayor did.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” agreed Karp for form’s sake, “the Mayor too. By the way, Bloom didn’t even tell Wharton. I saw that during deposition. When I asked him what happened in May to make him want to fire Murray, he went white, and Wharton was obviously totally unprepared for the question. This is a very private party.”

  Karp rose and began pacing, his face blank with thought. He mumbled to himself in time with his steps, “What did he do, what did he do?” He stopped and spun, facing Marlene. “It was May. What happened last May? About the middle of the month. That’s when it all started.”

  “The gypsies died before that,” said Marlene.

  “Exactly. They killed the two kids, hanged them somehow. They must have been scared shitless of a serious investigation. Everybody knew they were shaking down cabbies; the whole thing was set to blow up, and then they lucked out. They caught the D.A.—sorry, the D.A. or the Mayor—doing something that gave them a lock on any conceivable investigation—except an investigation cranked up by the one person they couldn’t control. . . .”

  Marlene slapped her thigh, a whipcrack sound that stopped Karp’s musings.

  “Seaver!” she cried. To Karp’s puzzled stare she added, “They. You keep saying ‘they.’ I just realized who the other guy besides Jackson had to be, because Stupe got ripped off by two cops. A private party, you said: yeah, but not just Jackson and Bloom. Guma told me Bloom name-requested a cop from the Two-Five, a cop who got promoted mysteriously fast to detective second, a cop who’s working in the D.A. squad, the same D.A. squad pulling this phony investigation routine. It’s John Seaver. I’ll bet he pulled those autopsy files from the M.E. And … I’ll bet when we check, we’ll find that Seaver’s partner up at the old Two-Five was …”

  “Paul Jackson,” they both said in unison, and laughed.

  Karp sobered quickly. “Fine, say Seaver and Jackson are it; what does that buy us? We have no evidence, no witnesses …”

  “Stupe can ID them ripping her off as a cabbie.”

  “Uh-huh, a reporter’s word against two cops. No, that’s the problem, Marlene. We can’t proceed in bits and pieces like in a normal criminal case. We need the whole enchilada, with proof, or we have nothing.”

  “I’ll talk to Seaver,” said Marlene. “Maybe he’s bursting with remorse.”

  “Do that. I’ll call Phil DeLino in the morning and lay this out for him, maybe it’ll rattle some cages. If the Mayor’s involved in any way, Phil’ll start sniffing for a deal. If not, maybe we can get His Honor to start distancing himself from Bloom.”

  After that, they talked details: who would do what and when, and who would mind the kid, the companionable bargaining of married life, in which Karp found himself remarkably able to forget that his wife’s career involved dealing with extremely nasty armed persons. Marlene made a pot of tea and they settled in to drink it, and munch on biscotti, and watch Bogart get the girl and send the bad guys to perdition.

  “Do you think our life is becoming too much like a movie?” said Marlene as the final credits rolled. “Excessively romantic?”

  “Having second thoughts?”

  “Oh, yeah,” admitted Marlene, “and third and fourth ones. Don’t think it doesn’t cross my mind in the middle of some of the things I’ve been doing lately that I could be drafting contracts in some cozy office. Still, somebody must be living lives like they do movies about. I mean, Don Quixote was crazy, but there were actually knights, weren’t there?”

  Karp gave her a look that mingled love and apprehension and then adop
ted a more cheerful expression, replying Bogartly, “Whatever you say, shweetheart.”

  The next day Marlene dressed in civilian clothes, a plum-colored wool suit, with Ferragamo pumps and her glass eye, and went uptown to Dr. Memelstein’s office for her six-month maternity checkup, where she received something of a shock, such that on leaving she repaired to a nearby cocktail lounge, where she ordered a Jameson’s up, soda on the side, which, when it came, she decided not to drink, but sat there for a half hour, sipping the chaser.

  She then called Harry Bello from a phone in the place.

  “Harry, it’s me. John Seaver, D.A. squad. Did you know him when you worked there? He started in the spring of last year sometime.”

  “To talk to. Why?”

  “What’s he look like?” asked Marlene, ignoring the question.

  “Five eight, one sixty, brown hair, brown eyes, mustache, dark complexion. A dresser. Could be some P.R. in there. Why?” More insistently.

  “Harry, I’ll tell you the story later. Let’s meet for lunch at the office. Bye.”

  After this, she took a cab down to the courthouse on Centre Street, where, using her old ID, she inveigled herself into the D.A. squad offices and lay in wait for John Seaver.

  This is a guy in trouble, was her first thought when he walked in. He was a dresser, though. He wore a blue-gray Italian suit, with what was probably a Sulka, and the little tasseled loafers with the gold trimming that all the boys in narco like to wear. The face didn’t fit the jaunty outfit: it had gone yellowish and soft-looking, like something was rotting it from inside, and the eyes were deeply shadowed. John wasn’t getting his eight hours, Marlene concluded.

  “Detective Seaver? I’m Marlene Ciampi,” she said, standing in his path before his cubicle door and holding her hand out for him to shake. Which he did, limply. “I wonder if you could spare me a minute.”

  When they were seated in his space, she said, handing him a card, “I used to work here, but now I’m in private practice with Harry Bello, who used to work a couple of doors down. We’ve been retained by Bohm Landsdorff on the Selig case. You’re familiar with it?”

  “Uh, not really.”

  Marlene smiled charmingly. “Oh, well, neither am I, to tell the truth, but they asked me to clean up one little item, which is this investigation that the D.A. squad is apparently, supposedly, running on the medical examiner’s office. Now, I’ve already checked through official channels, Lieutenant Spicer and all, and he doesn’t know anything about it, and the defendants in this case, um, the Mayor, and the D.A., Mr. Bloom, they sure haven’t shared any information about any investigation, like they’re supposed to.” She paused.

  “Excuse me,” said Seaver, “I don’t understand why you’re talking to me. If there’s no investigation—”

  “Oh, yeah, but see, Detective Seaver, the thing is, even though there’s no investigation, you’ve been investigating. That’s what sort of threw us.”

  “I have?” Coolly said, but Marlene saw his throat working.

  “Uh-huh. You went down to the M.E.’s files and flashed your D.A. squad ID and pulled three sets of autopsy records and told them that it was part of an investigation.” Guessing, but who else could it have been?

  Seaver had to clear his throat. “No, I didn’t.”

  Marlene breezed on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Yeah, and we thought it was kind of strange that it was you, considering the nature of the autopsies. The dead people, I mean. We thought, hey, if they thought there was something phony about the suicides, and if they thought that Dr. Selig had somehow screwed up in calling them suicides, why would they involve the very detective who arrested these kids? And probably interrogated them at the precinct. Or maybe it was just a funny coincidence.”

  Seaver was trying to assemble a shit-eating grin on his sallow face, but the pieces kept getting lost. “I really don’t know what you’re—” he started, but Marlene continued:

  “Yeah, actually, you do. And we also contacted Tom Devlin at Internal Affairs. He’s not interested in the suicides, because the M.E. said they were legit, but he was real interested in a gypsy cab shakedown racket up by the Two-Five, until he got orders from the D.A. to stop it, because it was part of a bigger investigation, a bigger investigation that does not seem to exist. Very peculiar. You wouldn’t have any perceptions you’d care to share with me on any of this, would you, Detective?”

  Seaver licked his lips, which looked raw and much chewed. “No, you lost me there. Look, I don’t really see where I can help you, and I got things I have to do, so—”

  “No problem,” said Marlene cheerily, “I appreciate the time, and as a matter of fact, I have stuff to do too. But, you know, I’m sure we’ll be running into one another again because, as I’m sure you know, as a professional detective, that when somebody’s put together a really fancy scam, they always leave a few threads loose—hey, we’re all human, right? You can’t think of everything. But when somebody else starts to pull those loose threads, it’s really hard to keep the whole thing from coming unraveled. Now, whoever put this together figured that Dr. Murray Selig would be the one pulling the threads because, you know, between you and me, Detective, two of those kids were murdered in custody—the suicide findings don’t bear a second look—so, the thinking was, get rid of him and you’re home free. And, really, it should have worked out fine. They had no way to figure that Selig would hire just the lawyer who had a wife whose friend was an investigative reporter investigating the mysterious deaths of a couple of gypsy cabbies, and that they would all put their heads together, and the whole thing would come unglued. By the way, pounding on Ariadne Stupenagel was a serious mistake, because it confirmed that the gypsy shakedowns were serious enough to kill somebody for. Another little pull on the tangle. In fact, I would say that in a little while all the principals in this scam are going to be running around like maniacs looking for some kind of a deal, and I would also say, speaking as an attorney now, that the very first person to come clean about the thing would get the best deal going. Wouldn’t you agree, Detective?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Seaver. His color was bad, and he seemed not to be able to stop swallowing.

  Marlene rose. “So long, Detective Seaver. Call me if you think of anything that might be useful.” She left him staring at her back.

  It was a good while before he was able to begin stabbing a familiar number into his phone with shaking fingers.

  “Twins?” Karp exclaimed.

  “Yes, each with a little heartbeat, and didn’t I need a drink when I heard it, and wasn’t I a good girl not to have one?”

  Karp shook his head and stared wonderingly at his wife. “Did you find out? I mean, girls, boys, mixed… ?”

  “No, Memelstein offered to do a sonogram, but I said that if God wanted us to know that stuff in advance, He would have supplied us with little glass portholes.” Marlene sat down in the bed. “My God! We’ll have three children!”

  “We can afford it,” said Karp practically, sitting next to her. “Or will, if we win this case.”

  “Seaver has three kids,” said Marlene musingly. “There was a picture on his desk. Three kids, no wifey. Probably a divorce. Maybe he’s got money problems. It’s probably why he went into it with Jackson, the shakedowns. The guy doesn’t seem the type; I mean, a little easy graft, but nothing heavy—not murder, anyway. He’s coming apart behind it.”

  Marlene filled Karp in about her interview that morning. “Will he crack, you think?” he asked.

  “Maybe. When the hounds start getting closer. Which I will endeavor to arrange. Jesus, three kids!”

  SIXTEEN

  In examining notionally hostile witnesses, Karp had found that a kindly tone and punctilious courtesy answered better than the showy browbeat favored by many in his profession, unless, of course, he thought some jerk was trying to slip a whopper past him, in which case he could adopt a mien that could blowtorch paint. That lacking, he had learned, a civilized manner
kept the judges happy and prevented any unwanted sympathy for the witness stirring in the breasts of the jury. Most remarkably, it also made most witnesses less hostile. Considerations of policy are almost never as strong as the natural human desire for respect and kindness.

  Beyond this, the present witness, Assistant District Attorney Marsha Davis, inspired actual sympathy in Karp. Davis was a tall woman in her late twenties with a well-cut head of dark hair framing an unfortunate large-nosed face, short on chin and equipped (as if to make up for that deficit) with what seemed like more than the usual number of large, equinoid teeth. Ms. Davis had been the A.D.A. in People v. Ralston, a homicide case brought to trial in the previous year. According to Bloom’s memo, Ms. Davis had complained that Dr. Selig had failed to return numerous telephone calls, that he had been insulting to her at a meeting in his office, at which another doctor had been present, and that he had not appeared in court when he should have, although he had been given four weeks’ notice of the appearance, his failure to appear having disrupted the Ralston murder trial.

  During the course of her testimony this morning, Karp had charmingly drawn from Ms. Davis that Ralston had been her very first homicide case, that she had received no specialized training in prosecuting homicides, and that she was unfamiliar with the practical operations of the medical examiner’s office.

  “Ms. Davis,” said Karp, “how many assistant district attorneys are there working felonies?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe three hundred, something like that.”

  “Three hundred. And how many chief medical examiners are there?”

  She narrowed her eyes: a trick question. “One.”

  “Do you think it’s reasonable to expect the chief medical examiner to be at the beck and call of every assistant district attorney?”

  “No, but …”

  “For example, was there ever a time in your career where the lack of contact with the medical examiner’s office impaired the prosecution of one of your cases?”