Absolute rage kac-14

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  The line "blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted" floated for an instant through Marlene's mind, but she banished it. She feared being hypocritical more than nearly anything, and so she said, "I don't know, but I think finding who did it and nailing them would be a good first step." Did she really believe this? That was the problem: What did she believe anymore? She sat up in bed. "And, as long as we're up, why don't you let me get dressed and I'll get started on the laws of your fine state."

  He shot to his feet. "Um, sorry." He went to the door. At which he paused and asked, "You think I should call Lucy? I mean, would she mind? I don't feel like talking to anyone from around here. They're all, I don't know, involved. Do you know what I mean?"

  "Yes, I think calling Lucy would be a good idea. Making a gigantic pot of coffee would be another one. Also, you can find me the number of the nearest television station."

  By eight, Marlene was washed, combed, dressed, caffeine-wired to the gills, and pounding on the door of a frame house on Maple Street, McCullensburg. The house belonged to Ernest Poole and needed a coat of paint. And a mowing out front. No answer, front door locked, so she went around the back, jiggled open the cheap lock, and went in with her dog. A smell of garbage in the kitchen, and the remains of a Colonel Sanders on the greasy table. Poole himself had not made it up the stairs last night. She found him in a club chair in the dusty living room, a neat pool of vomit between his feet and an empty bottle of Harper stuck upright between his thighs, like a transparent erection. After making a quick recon of the ground floor, she found a carpet runner in the hall and tipped the man out of his chair onto it. He groaned and twitched, but did not shed his stupor. The floors were hardwood, worn and smooth, so she had little trouble dragging him down the hall to a bathroom. She got him into the tub in sections, upper body first and then the legs. The mastiff looked on with interest, having licked up the vomit while Marlene was thus engaged, and hoping for more.

  Poole writhed like a bug on a grill when the cold water hit him and sat up, banging his head on the tap. It took a moment for his eyes to focus. When they did, they fixed on Marlene, at first in stunned amazement and then in fury. He clambered to his knees and shut off the water.

  "You! What the hell are you doing in my home?"

  "I'm helping you get ready for court this morning, counselor," she said brightly.

  "You're trespassing. Get out!"

  "Gosh, and here you invited me in. That's not trespass."

  "I did not invite you."

  "Yes, you did, the other day. Don't you remember? I thought we had a good understanding. Oh, no! Don't tell me you forget everything that went on."

  His eyes shifted. His brow wrinkled with the effort to recall.

  "Why don't you take off your clothes and have a nice, soothing shower, and shave. I'll make you some breakfast. We have plenty of time to be in court at nine-thirty." She flounced out.

  She found coffee, but the milk was sour. The bread was stale. Butter had he none, but she found a jar of strawberry jam in the back of the nearly bare refrigerator, which, when scraped of its interesting fungal cultures, did for smearing across the toast. She produced a tall pile of this, perked the coffee, and set the table. In the cabinet above the stove she located the inevitable reserve bottle and poured a shot into a mug of coffee. Next, a quick dump and wipe in the kitchen; not for nothing had she raised three children and a husband of more than usual sluttishness.

  He came in dressed and clean-shaven, if red-eyed, smelling of Listerine and some old-fashioned lilac cologne. He looked around the kitchen suspiciously. His glance drifted to the cabinet above the stove.

  Observing this, she said, "It's in the coffee. That's all you get until after court."

  He sat down. He took a long swallow of the spiked coffee, closed his eyes, sighed. "Would you mind telling me why you're doing this?"

  "I need you. Isn't it nice to be needed? I'm converting you temporarily from a dysfunctional drunk to a functional one, like half the people in the country. After this business is resolved, I'm out of here, and you can finish converting your liver into Silly Putty and die. It's nothing personal. Eat some toast while it's warm."

  "I'm not hungry."

  "Eat some anyway. Your body needs calories and carbs. You should take some B vitamins, too."

  He took a piece, nibbled it. Finishing one, he took another, and another. She sipped coffee and watched him. "See? Advice from one who knows."

  He regarded her balefully over his cup. "A functional drunk?"

  "Extremely. Why do you drink, by the way?"

  "Why do you?"

  "To quell my rage and my sympathies," she said. "I see cruel, malevolent people getting away with murder all around me and I want to stop them. Not to put too fine a point on it, I want to kill them, and I'm good at it. My options are being either a sober and happy murderess or a slightly stoned mom and businesswoman. I raise and train dogs, and I have three lovely children and a husband. I wish to retain them and their affection, which I can't do if I'm my real self. Now you."

  After a silence he said, "I killed my wife."

  "On purpose?"

  He stared at her, his mouth a little open. "Of course not! It was a car accident. We were driving home from a Christmas party in Charleston. The roads were slick and it was foggy. I ran right into the rear of a truck carrying pipe. The pipe came through the window and hit Sheila. She was decapitated. I didn't have a scratch. She was six months pregnant and happy as a horse in clover. It was a really great and loving marriage. That sad enough for you?"

  "Yup, that's pretty sad."

  "Can I have another drink?"

  "Not until after court, counselor. It's not that sad."

  "Tell me something," he said after his eyes dropped. "How did you get to be such a colossal bitch? Was it heredity, or did you work on it over the years?"

  "It took a lot of work. When I started out, butter wouldn't melt in my mouth," she replied without rancor. "You finished with that? Excellent! Let's go." This was good, she thought. If he hated her, it might move his mind off its dead center. He might even get mad enough to kick some butt in a courtroom.

  It was wide and high, paneled dark and painted white. Its Georgianglass windows were open to catch any breeze, and through them, besides an actual grassy breeze, there came the sounds of light traffic, a lawn mower, and farther off, someone practicing scales on a trombone. Small town, thought Marlene, this is what it would be like practicing law in a small town. The only discordant note was a television crew-a cameraman, a sound technician, and a reporter with spray-fixed hair and tan blazer. Every seat in the courtroom was occupied, in the main by the sort of people who occupy seats in courtrooms the world over-retirees and idlers of a certain stripe-but there was also a contingent of hard-looking younger men in one of the back rows. Unlike the people in New York courtrooms, she observed, all of these were white. Moses Welch was there, at the defense table, blinking amiably, his moon face untroubled by complex thought or obvious fear. At the prosecution table was a burly man in his late twenties wearing a blond crew cut and a cheap blue suit. On his face was the overly serious expression of a young man who wishes thereby to acquire gravitas. This was, Poole informed Marlene, the state's attorney, Stanley Hawes. Marlene nodded politely to him. He seemed surprised at this, but, after an awkward pause, nodded back. The judge entered. As she rose with the others, Marlene had to stifle a giggle. Judge Bill Y. Murdoch was practically a caricature of a corrupt judge; he could have walked out of a Daumier, lacking only the little round cap that French judges wear. He was pink, plump, beautifully barbered, with a boar's snout, a carnivorous slash of a mouth, and small avid eyes set off by dark eyebrows pointed like chevrons.

  The judge spent a few moments speaking with some court officials and a very fat man in a tan uniform, pointed out to Marlene as J. J. Swett, the county sheriff. Murdoch kept looking up at the TV crew. He did not look pleased to see them. After the sheriff and the others had di
spersed, Murdoch stared down at Poole and rattled some papers in his hand.

  "Ernie, you mind telling me what this is all about."

  "They're motions, Judge," said Poole, getting to his feet.

  "I know they're motions, Ernie. I can read. I mean why are they being filed at this date? I thought we had agreed to a disposition of this case. And you're changing your plea to not guilty?"

  "Yes, Judge. What's happened is the defendant has a new counsel, a co-counsel, actually, who has a different idea as to how the defense should proceed."

  Murdoch inspected the papers again. "That's this Kee-ampi fella?"

  Marlene rose. "That's Ciampi, Your Honor. That's me and I'm not a fella."

  A rustle of titters in the courtroom. Murdoch banged his gavel and glared them down and glared particularly at the cameraman, who had switched on his lights.

  Murdoch turned his glare onto Marlene. "And what exactly are you doing here, Miss Ciampi?"

  "I'm representing the defendant, Your Honor."

  "He already has counsel."

  "Yes, and he decided to retain additional counsel."

  The dark eyebrows compressed in a scowl. The judge made a summoning motion. Poole, Marlene, and Hawes approached the bench.

  The judge said, "All right, what's going on here? Ernie, you know Mose Welch can't hardly decide which flavor of ice cream he likes. How the hell can he opt for new counsel?"

  "You declared him competent to stand trial, Your Honor," said Poole. "He can aid in his own defense, and choice of counsel runs along with that competence."

  Murdoch's color rose. "Ernie, damnit, whose side…" He stopped short; no, he couldn't really say that. He turned his attention to Marlene. "And what's your interest in this case? A do-gooder, are you?"

  "Not at all, Judge. I am an attorney licensed in the state of New York, and I was a friend of one of the victims, Rose Heeney. Her sons called me and asked me to defend Moses Welch."

  "The victim's sons called you? They're paying for this?"

  "No pay is involved, Your Honor, but, yes."

  "Would you mind telling me why the victims want to get the murderer off?"

  "Because he's not the murderer," said Marlene.

  "He confessed to it," said Hawes.

  "Yes," said Marlene, giving the prosecutor a mild look, such as elementary-school teachers give pupils who are trying very hard. "And as you see, we're moving to suppress the confession. My client was kept incommunicado for fourteen hours, his family was kept from him, and he was coerced into signing a document he could not read by the promise of ice cream. He now repudiates his confession."

  "There was no coercion," said Hawes, "and I resent the implication that the confession was obtained through force of any kind."

  "Force isn't necessary," said Marlene. "We're not arguing from Brown. We would argue from Spano that the offer of any substantive good desired by the person in custody, whether food, or reading materials, clothing, or any ordinary or extraordinary privilege, as a quid pro quo for confession, is coercive per se, especially after an all-night interrogation, as was the case here. Also, given the defendant's mental abilities, his waiver of his right to counsel is highly suspect under Tague."

  Hawes stared at her, perhaps trying to remember who Tague was.

  Judge Murdoch frowned again and looked up at the TV camera. "All right, all right. I'll hear arguments now." He waved them back to their places.

  Marlene began. Her essential argument was from Tague v. Louisiana, a U.S. Supreme Court case that held that the burden was on the state to demonstrate that the defendant understood his waiver of the right to counsel. Moses Welch had the mind of a five-year-old, which any reasonable person observing him could see. He should have been treated like a five-year-old therefore, and no confession should have been elicited from him without the presence of his family and legal counsel. The bribery of the ice cream was in violation of the Supreme Court decision in Spano v. New York, in that the combination of the all-night session, the denial of contact between a childlike prisoner and his family, and the bribe combine to produce an inherent untrustworthiness.

  In his rebuttal, Hawes cited Connelly, in which the Supreme Court ruled that even if the mental incapacity of the defendant is the cause of the confession, due process is not violated absent police conduct causally related to the confession. He called J. J. Swett as a witness. Swett, a moonfaced porker with beetle-black eyes, long silver locks, and lobe-long sideburns, took the stand and lied that there had been no bribe of ice cream. Marlene did not bother to cross-examine. Murdoch denied the motion with obvious relish.

  Marlene argued the next motion, to suppress the key evidence in the case, the bloodstained boots. She had not expected much from this and was not surprised when it was denied. She also applied for reduced bail, on the grounds that Mose Welch could not drive, had no money, and was hardly a flight risk. This was also denied. Swift justice in Robbens County, Marlene thought as she gathered her papers. In the real world, sometimes judges took a couple of days to reach a literally judicious decision on motions of these types, but not here apparently.

  Three strikes, then, but Marlene still felt some satisfaction, and this increased after her interview with the young man in the tan blazer. She figured that justice in Robbens County was not used to the glare, its usual habit being to crawl around under damp rocks, and she had no compunction about accusing the county of trying to railroad a helpless mentally handicapped man because they were too stupid or too lazy or too corrupt to search for the real killers. She hoped that at least five seconds of that would that evening bounce out of space down through every dish in the county.

  She walked out of the courthouse with Poole.

  "See what I mean?" said Poole.

  "Oh, I thought we did okay. They're on notice that we intend a real defense. In my experience with small-town cozy corruption, that tends to shake them up. They'll make mistakes, which we will capitalize on. You didn't doze off at any rate."

  "No, but I intend to shortly. I intend to sink into my accustomed alcoholic stupor. Care to join me?"

  "No, thank you. Before you collapse, I'd appreciate it if you'd assemble all the discovery material we asked for. I'm particularly interested in any crime-scene photos and a sense of where these bozos looked before old Mose dropped into their laps."

  Poole was shaking his head. "You still don't get it, do you? Motions? Discovery? The bottom line is still, they get what they want. They like to get it with all the legal niceties if they can, but if they can't, if you block them there, they'll get it anyway. You see those cars?"

  He pointed to a Mercedes sedan and a Land Rover parked in the stalls nearest to the courthouse curb. "The Merc belongs to Judge Murdoch. The Rover is Swett's. Both vehicles each cost more than the annual salaries of their owners. We are not subtle about corruption in Robbens County. Unsubtlety is in fact the point. The message is, play along and you get taken care of. Don't play along and you also get taken care of, which is the message of what happened to Red Heeney and his family. The Heeney murders are not going to be investigated and the murderers are not going to be caught, tried, and convicted."

  "We'll see about that." Marlene reflected that she had used that line rather too much lately.

  Poole flapped his hand weakly at her and turned away. "Go home, Ciampi," he said over his shoulder. "Go back to America."

  8

  "So, are you going to do it?" asked Murrow.

  "I might," answered Karp. "I practically said I would just to keep him from hoching me. He's the kind of guy who, if he thinks faking a heart attack will roll you, will turn gray and collapse."

  "Can I come, too? I kind of like the idea of fighting real bad guys, like in the movies, instead of the pathetic characters we usually put away."

  "No, you have to stay here and watch the store while I have all the fun."

  Murrow slumped in his chair, clutching his chest and producing a good imitation of Cheyne-Stokes respiration.


  Karp laughed briefly. "I better stay here. You need supervision."

  "You'll do it," said Murrow confidently. "I can see it in your eyes. I'd do it in a minute, in the unlikely event that anyone ever asked me to."

  "Yeah, but you're a young squirt without responsibilities, and you don't have a wife working the very same operation unofficially."

  "Would that be a problem?"

  "Oh, Marlene? Investigating a sensitive and complex case on her own? A problem? No, why would you think that? Fortunately, I have reason to believe she's unarmed at the present time." Karp leaned back in his chair, swiveled to face the window, chewed on a pencil. Murrow, seeing this, left quietly, closing the office door behind him. He knew these were the signs that Karp was entering Karpland, as all the office called it, and was therefore not to be disturbed until he reentered the terrestrial sphere, usually with the solution to some intricate problem.

  Being manipulated stood high on the list of all the things Karp didn't like. Why should he disturb his life and dash off to some godforsaken province because it was important to Saul Sterner? Let them handle it themselves. Let them all shoot each other. Red Heeney was an idiot who'd gotten his wife and daughter killed along with himself because he was stupid and full of bravado and a drunk besides, unlike himself, who was cautious and smart and free of alcoholic fumes in the brain, and unlike also his wife, who was rattling around in the same hellhole that had killed the Heeneys, New York not being dangerous enough for her anymore. Marlene, he knew, was in a familiar phase of her cycle. A settled life afflicted her like a slow toxin, building up in her soul until it flipped a switch, at which point she had to do something grotesque and outrageous, usually involving gunshots and financial ruin. The woman had given away something like $40 million because the money had a smell of deceit and death on it. Nice that she could afford such scruples, whereas he had to punch the clock at the DA every day until forever, until he retired a desiccated husk and corrupt to the eyes, waiting for the cancer to get him, like Guma.