No Lesser Plea bcamc-1

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Karp thought, this is the Real, all right. It was one thing to respect the man through reputation; it was another to see with your own eyes the splendid power that made Francis P. Garrahy one of the most devastating prosecuting attorneys in the history of American jurisprudence and one of the great men of his generation. At that moment, Karp would gladly have traded twenty years of his life to have worked under Garrahy in his prime.

  The moment passed. Garrahy slumped back in his big chair. He began to rub his chest in a circular motion. Then he fumbled in his desk drawer, extracted a pill, and swallowed it with some water from his desk carafe. When he looked up again, he seemed older-and surprised to see the room filled with people. He waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal, as if brushing away insects. The office was cleared in three seconds.

  In the hall outside, the attorneys were hurrying back to their stations in courtroom or office, chatting nervously. It had not been so bad after all. Roland Hrcany fell in with Karp.

  “Helluva speech,” said Hrcany. “Made me feel real small. We’ll have to be more discreet about our excesses in the future.”

  “Assuming there is one,” said Karp. “I’ve got a feeling that was the last dab of whipped cream in the bowl.”

  “Mr. Karp!” It was Ida, the secretary, calling from Garrahy’s doorway. She jerked her thumb back over her shoulder. “He wants to see you.”

  Hrcany said, “He must want the other testicle.”

  Karp went back into Garrahy’s office. The old man hadn’t moved. He motioned Karp to a chair.

  “I’ll be blunt,” he said, his voice once again an old man’s gravel. “I’m moving you out of Homicide.”

  Karp’s stomach hit the top of his shoes and rebounded. Oh, shit, he found out about the pistol.

  “What! You mean because of the party?” he said weakly.

  “God, no! What has that to do with it?”

  “Then … ah … I don’t understand. You think I haven’t been doing the job?”

  “Of course not. You’re an excellent prosecutor. But you’ve got enemies there now. I see you’re surprised.” He let out a dry chuckle. “People are. They think I sit here and talk to politicians all day. Or that I’m drooling.

  “Jack Conlin will never forgive you. I’ve known him for twenty years, no, twenty-five. An unforgiving, a relentless man. That’s what you get for dabbling in politics, my boy. But I’m grateful to you. Not many would have done what you did. And it’s time for the rewards.”

  “Mister Garrahy, please! I hope you don’t think …”

  “What? That you helped me out of ambition? What of it? How do you think this city works, God help it? You helped me out and I’m returning the favor. How would you like to be an assistant bureau chief?”

  “An assistant bureau chief?” said Karp idiotically.

  “Yes. The Criminal Courts Bureau. Cheeseborough’s retiring next week. Frank Gelb’s moving in, but I expect he’ll be swamped with paperwork. He’ll need someone to work with the new attorneys, show them how we do things around here. It’ll give you a chance to shake the bottom of the system up a little bit. I’ve spoken with Gelb, and it’s OK with him. What about it?”

  “Mister Garrahy, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say yes. Learn to take, Butch. God knows you give enough. All of you.”

  Karp said yes and shook his chief’s hand. It was small, cold and dry.

  He was hardly back in the office when the phone rang.

  “Thirty-nine,” said Sonny Dunbar over the line. His voice was high and excited.

  “What’s thirty-nine, Sonny?”

  “There are thirty-nine dead junkie shotgun killers. I’m down at Police Records. They closed out fifty-six separate homicides on them over the past five years. In each case, all the witnesses were killed with a shotgun blast to the head. Except the Marchione kid, who got it with a.38. Each case was closed when a junkie was found dead of an overdose with incriminating evidence around him. In each case, the junkie was a slightly built black male. We even had three positive IDs of the ‘killer’ on the slab, from people who said they saw him leaving the crime scene. And in twenty-four of the cases, the cops were led to the corpse or the getaway car by an anonymous tip.”

  “Holy shit, Sonny, this guy might have killed nearly a hundred people in five years. He could be the greatest mass murderer in history.”

  “Could be, brother, but try and prove it. He suckered us good.”

  “Yeah, but no more. Listen, make copies of all those files and get them to me, all right? Oh, and I’ll probably be changing offices. It looks like I got a new job.”

  “Oh, yeah? Does that mean somebody else is going to ride this case?”

  “No way, baby. This is our private war. Keep it under your hat, and find that other guy!”

  “You’re on. We’ll get him.”

  That evening, Karp and Marlene Ciampi had dinner at Villa Cella. They hadn’t seen each other in several days, because Marlene was involved with a major case. Some members of an organization called the Bakunin Society had blown themselves up in a townhouse in the East Sixties. The police had investigated and rounded up several of the surviving members. It turned out that they had planted dozens of bombs in the New York area over the past year, including one, a letter bomb, that had killed a federal judge’s secretary. Apparently they did not teach you in revolution school that big shots have their mail opened by members of the working class. As if it mattered.

  “Anyway, I’m now an expert on what they used to call infernal machines. Letter bombs. Pipe bombs. Did you know you could go into any hardware store and buy the raw materials to build a bomb that’ll level a building? The pros, though, try to get military explosives-C-4, plastic. And these little shits had a load of it. They’re still trying to trace where it came from.

  “But, Butch, the thing that sticks in my mind about the case is these kids-hah, I say ‘kids,’ but one of these guys was older than me-the wackiest thing was how sure they were about themselves, that what they were doing was right. I mean, I’m not that sure about what I’m doing and I’ve got the whole fucking society patting me on the back, you know?”

  Karp said, “What’s the problem? They’re fanatics, right.”

  “Bullshit, you’re a fanatic, for that matter. No, the thing that hit me about them was how weird it was for them to end up this way. One of them, the guy who was in the house when it went up, had half his face missing and an arm that didn’t work anymore, but they seemed, I don’t know, satisfied. These are middle-class people now, I mean, every advantage, care, education, the works. Not exactly the desperate poor.”

  Karp chewed his lasagna and considered this. “I don’t know, but I think it has something to do with power. I mean, there’s the criminal who commits crimes because he can’t do anything else, or because everybody he knows is into some kind of hustle. But I also think there’s a kind of criminal who’s got a hole in him that he has to fill, who gets whatever we get from our work out of beating the squares.

  “Your terrorists are criminals who get their self-respect out of killing people and blowing things up for a cause. That and keeping themselves pure. They’re just stuffing in bullshit to fill up that hollow place. The cause doesn’t matter, I don’t think, except to give an inflated tone to the whole business. I mean, they make these incredible demands-dismantle the fascist state, and that bullshit-but if the demands were actually met, would they stop being terrorists? Hell, no. Even if they ran the whole country, they wouldn’t stop eating people up. The point of their lives is to fuck people over. If they didn’t get to do that, they’d dry up and blow away.”

  “Damn, Butch, you’re really getting excited about this. You’re practically waxing philosophical. So tell me, where does the hollow place come from?”

  Karp was oddly embarrassed. Like many men successful in manipulating the world and its powers, he was uncomfortable with analytic thought. He also felt strange speaking in this vein to his lover. He
had never discussed his work abstractly with his wife. Their after-work conversation consisted of brief assessments of how the day had gone (“Lousy.” “OK.” “Great.”) and anecdotes about personalities or events. Also, there was the feeling, of which he was ashamed, and which he suppressed, that Marlene was a hair sharper in the thinking department than he was. This added to his discomfort. He retreated into toughness.

  “I don’t know. I’m no criminologist. And you know what? I don’t really give a rat’s ass. I’m not in the understanding business, I’m in the putting asses in jail and keeping mutts from fucking people over business. It’s hard enough.”

  “So it is. On the other hand, I’m not sure you can survive long doing what we do without developing some understanding for the bad guys. Look at the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky. He keeps his mouth shut and radiates understanding and the killer spills his guts. Case closed.”

  “Dostoevsky? Didn’t he write New York State Criminal Procedure?”

  She laughed. “Up yours, Karp. You’re such a barbarian, I don’t know why I bother talking to you.”

  She lit a cigarette, drew deeply, and coughed.

  “You ought to quit smoking,” he said.

  She squinted at him through a gray haze. “I ought to quit seeing you, but I won’t,” she retorted. “Besides, I tried once and gained fourteen pounds in a month. Fuck the surgeon general. A size five is well worth ten years of life.”

  The waiter came back with coffee, American for Karp, espresso for Marlene.

  “Well,” said Karp, after they finished, “my place or yours, baby?”

  “How romantic! You didn’t even ask me what my sign was.”

  “OK, what’s your sign?” “Scorpio.”

  “I knew it,” said Karp. “Let’s fuck.”

  Later, they walked north out of Little Italy, toward Karp’s place in the Village. The night was warm and muggy, and smelled of anise and frying sausage. At 14th Street they passed a TV and appliance store. Marlene remarked, “Hey, Butch, that place is having a going-out-of-business sale. Why don’t you pick yourself up a TV?”

  “I’ve got a TV,” answered Karp, moving on. “And this guy’s been going out of business since Nineteen Fifty-two.”

  But Marlene had stopped. “No, you don’t have a TV. You have a rowing machine. You get much better reception with a TV set.”

  “No, really, I do have one. It’s in storage with the rest of my stuff.”

  “Oh, that does a lot of good. Is it color?”

  “No, black and white. What is this, Marlene, you having media withdrawal?”

  She smiled sheepishly. “Oh, nothing. I just, you know, like to watch TV in bed. And if I don’t catch the news in the morning, I get nauseous.”

  He laughed. “OK, Champ, I unconditionally support any activity you do in bed.”

  They turned to study the dozen or so sets in the window. They were all tuned to the same channel. A woman did a dance in her bathroom. They couldn’t hear the sound, but it was clear from the words on the screen that she was glad that her toilet paper was extremely soft. Then a famous newscaster came on, looking grave. Then another face came on the screen.

  Karp said, “Hey, look, it’s the DA.”

  Garrahy’s weathered face was replaced by one even more famous, that of the governor of New York. He was addressing a crowd of newsmen at a press conference. He looked grave as well. Then another face, not a famous one at all, appeared on the screen.

  Karp caught on. “Oh, God damn! God damn it!” he cried and ran into the store. There were sets operating within the store, too, and Karp rushed up to one of them and turned up the volume. The not-very-famous face was saying, “pledge to do my utmost to carry on the great traditions of this office.”

  The famous newscaster came on and said, “Sanford Bloom, just appointed to the post of New York District Attorney, replacing Francis Phillip Garrahy, dead tonight of a heart attack at the age of seventy-three. It’s the end of an era for criminal justice in New York, at a time when most Americans feel that crime is their most important concern. In Washington today, the president asked for …”

  Karp snapped off the sound. He felt Marlene’s hand on his arm. He looked down at her. His face was contorted with grief and miserable with unshed tears. She tried to lead him out of the store. He moved stumblingly, like a mourner being tugged away from a grave. She held tightly to his hand as they walked in silence. Finally, she said, “Butch, he was an old man …”

  He turned facing her, pulling away, his eyes blazing. “I know he was old, Marlene. You don’t have to tell me he was old. Guy that old should be sitting on the beach in Florida, playing with grandchildren. But, oh no! Butch couldn’t do without his fucking hero. He had to keep him around one more term. And it killed him.”

  “Come on, Butch …”

  “No, it’s true. I am a total piece of shit.”

  “No, you are not a total piece of shit. What you are is a self-centered, perfectionist, workaholic asshole with a tendency to overdramatize. I’m sorry he’s dead, too, but he was an old man, and old men also die on the beach in Florida. He died with his boots on, and that was the kind of person he was anyway. And he didn’t have any grandchildren.

  “OK, you convinced him to run. He was a grown-up. He knew how to call a doctor and get a physical. You want to mourn him? Fine. God knows he’s worth mourning for. But make sure it’s him you’re mourning and not something to do with your self-image and the failure of your little schemes.”

  “Thank you, Marlene, dear. That was quite a little speech. I’m glad I can count on you for support …”

  “SHIT!” Marlene yelled at the top of her voice. “You won’t listen and you won’t stop! You’re not thinking about Garrahy. You’re just thinking about yourself and your fucking guilt. Now snap out of it! Get drunk or go to church or take me home and pull my pants off, but stop this goddamned whining.”

  “Hey, I didn’t start this fight,” said Karp weakly.

  “FIGHT! You think this is a fight? This isn’t a fight. This is a fight.” With that she slammed her fist into him just above the belt buckle. Then she dropped her shoulder bag to the pavement, snapped into a fighter’s crouch and started to pound him with quick, sharp punches in the midsection.

  Karp was driven back against a building, shielding himself with his forearms. “Hey, damn it, stop it, Marlene! Cut it out! I mean it, cut it out!”

  But she kept at it, bobbing and weaving, ducking her head, landing punches. “Come on, you wanna fight? Come on, you big bastard, fight!”

  A small crowd of half a dozen or so had gathered to watch. Somebody laughed and said, “Two bucks on the chick.”

  Karp shouted, “OK, you asked for it,” and lashed out with his right, an openhanded blow to her head. To his amazement, she blocked with her left, ducked under the punch and threw a right cross to his mouth that rocked his head back and split his lip. He let out a yell and charged forward. He grabbed her at the shoulders and pulled her to him in a tight clinch. She was trying to work her arms up between them and break his hold, when something wet dropped on her face. She looked up and saw that Karp’s chin was covered with blood.

  “Oh, Butch, you’re bleeding. Oh, no, I’m sorry. Oh, let me go, I’ll get you a hankie.”

  She squirmed out of his grasp, picked up her bag, extracted a handkerchief and pressed it tenderly to his cut lip. “Please, don’t be mad at me, Butch. It just drives me crazy when you act all schmucky like that.” She kissed his cheek and hugged him. The crowd drifted away. The joker said, “I tol’ya. The chick by a TKO.”

  Karp, still a bit stunned, wiped at his lip and chin. “That’s OK, Marlene. It was a little unexpected, that’s all.” He grinned bloodily. “I don’t intend to press charges for assault.”

  “Thank God! I thought I was looking at six in the House of D.”

  “Where did you learn to box like that?” Karp asked as they walked north again, holding hands.

  “Oh, from
my old man. We all used to watch the Friday night fights together, and then we would all roughhouse. Girls, boys, it didn’t make any difference, until the girls grew tits. Then we had to ref.”

  “Smart daddy.”

  “Yeah, really. But I guess it was the whole scene at home. My mom and dad are both really physical people, you know? Lots of hugs, kisses, and smacks in the head. They would get to fighting over something and start swinging punches. I mean he didn’t beat up on her or anything, they just used to whale away at each other in the kitchen or wherever. Then they used to cry and clean each other up and jump into bed and ball. It wasn’t scary or anything, the fighting, because we knew they loved each other a lot. Still do, in fact. I bet you think that’s pretty primitive, huh?”

  “Not the jumping-into-bed part.”

  “Ooh, goody. I’m hot as a pistol. Let’s take a cab.”

  As Guma had predicted, it was a helluva wake. Flags flew at half-mast throughout the city as the mortal remains of Francis Garrahy lay in state for three days in a funeral home, guarded by spit-and-polished cops from the Emerald Society, while the great and famous and the ordinary people whose lives he had touched filed past. Then came the state funeral with its police bands, the eulogy by the governor himself, the tributes by anyone of any consequence connected to the criminal justice business, the City of New York, or Ireland.

  They buried him on a sunny Saturday in June in Queens, the Borough of the Dead and the Might As Well Be, as they say in Manhattan. Karp went, as did the rest of the office, and did not cry. He was amazed to see Ray Guma wiping tears and blowing his nose like a bereaved widow.

  Chapter 15

  On the Monday after Garrahy’s funeral, Sanford L. Bloom held his first senior staff meeting as district attorney. Karp’s name had been entered as an assistant bureau chief, in what was probably one of Garrahy’s last official acts, so he was on the list and he attended.

  The nine bureau chiefs and their deputies took their places around the long oak table in the DA’s conference room. Conlin and Joe Lerner were up toward the head of the table next to the door to the new DA’s office. Conlin looked dyspeptic while Lerner looked nervous and uncomfortable. The other chiefs-all Garrahy’s men, some of whom had served him for decades-appeared similarly uncomfortable, like the leaders of a nation defeated in war, waiting upon the commander of the occupying forces.