Justice Denied

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “If you say so, Roland. It sure comes at a good time. Bloom’s been on the horn three, four times, what’s going down with the U.N. thing? You sure don’t want to kill anybody with political clout on his watch. I presume you’ll want to bring the good news personally to Mr. District Attorney.”

  Roland did indeed want to bring the news to Bloom, and stand next to him at the press conference that Bloom would instantly arrange, but he would die before admitting it to Karp. If Roland shared Karp’s contempt for the D.A. as a legal mind, he was more attracted than Karp to power—not an unusual thing in bright and ambitious men, especially lawyers. Roland knew that, given a chance, he could manipulate the D.A.—in the interests of good, of course. The present case seemed an ideal opportunity to do so. Roland shrugged and said, “Hey, whatever.”

  Karp smiled again. “Go do it, Roland. Give him a kiss for me.”

  Roland laughed, a deep, loud rumble. “On the lips, Butch.”

  3

  As soon as Roland left, Karp put the murder of the Turkish diplomat entirely out of his mind and turned to the contemplation of a kind of murder less distinguished but far more numerous. From the center drawer of his desk he extracted a large sheet of yellow paper. It was actually four sheets of the large-ruled stock that accountants call spreadsheets taped together. On it were written the names of his attorneys, the cases they were responsible for, and the schedule proposed for each case.

  There was an elaborate computer system that was supposed to do the same thing, but Karp knew that system to be out of date and unreliable. He knew it to be unreliable because he had fed enough lies into it to make it so. Bloom and his administrative satrap, Conrad Wharton, placed a high priority first on pumping clearances through the courts and second, on putting forth special effort toward punishing culprits who had the temerity to harm important or interesting people.

  Karp smoothed the sheet on his desk. There were nine hundred and fifty homicides listed, which gave each of his people an average of thirty-odd each. In practice, no one worked on thirty homicides; a single homicide trial was absolutely consuming for a single prosecutor, and some cases required more than one. The saving fact was that not all cases went to trial.

  Karp ran his eye over the spreadsheets. Perhaps two-thirds of the killings were what the cops called grounders: perfectly obvious events in which someone had aced a loved one or acquaintance and there was absolutely no doubt about what had gone down. When the homicide was the result of the usual brew—poverty, frustration, the last unbearable insult at an unusually vulnerable moment, the convenience of a loaded handgun—the defendant would be allowed to cop to manslaughter one or two. They’d go up for anything up to twenty-five years, depending on the judge, but most would be out after the mandatory minimum—as little as five years for manslaughter two.

  On the other hand, it was not a good idea to make a habit of it in New York County on Karp’s watch. This guy Chester Hollis—Karp’s pencil moved to touch People v. Hollis on the sheet—had just killed his third wife, two years after a six-year stretch upstate for killing a girlfriend. Before that he had killed his first wife and done sixty-two months for that. Mr. Hollis would not be allowed a plea, unless it was a plea to guilty on the top count of murder two. If Mr. Hollis chose to exercise his right to a trial (as he probably would) and if he was convicted (by no means a dead certainty) he would go up for twenty-five to life, and would serve at least twenty-five years, at which point he would presumably be too decrepit to attract a fourth sucker, or to use a hammer on her if he did.

  Although there were legal limitations on what pleas could be accepted for what original indictments, A.D.A.’s had enormous discretion. Karp’s job was to arrange and staff the flow of cases, within the number of trial slots he had available to him, so that a reasonable proportion of the truly wicked were removed from society for as long as possible. In general, the grounders took care of themselves. Except in cases of special circumstances, like Mr. Hollis, or where insanity pleadings or legal technicalities were involved, Karp allowed the system to crank along on autopilot. He had a competent staff he’d recruited himself, and he trusted them.

  Besides the grounders, and making up about a third of all homicides, there were the mysteries: any case for which there was not an immediate suspect. The mysteries stood out on Karp’s chart because he had outlined the little box labeled “defendant” in red. The little box was often blank.

  Some were of fairly obvious provenance—a dead man on a mean street with a bullet through the chest and his pockets turned out—while others were exotic: two freshly severed female heads neatly placed on a table in a West Side motel room. All were problems.

  They sometimes required elaborate investigations, and typically resulted in cases based on circumstantial evidence, which usually meant that the guy, when they found him, would deny it. Legally the A.D.A.’s were supposed to be in charge of these investigations, but in general the detectives tended to do pretty much as they pleased until they had a suspect. Most prosecutors thought it was wise to concede them that role, but not Karp. He insisted that his people visit the crime scene, handle the physical evidence, and attend the autopsies of the victims.

  And among the mysteries, as a matter of course, were the cases that caused the greatest political heat, the ones where either the suspect or the victim was a taxpayer of note, or where members of one race had done in members of another, or where the vic was especially photogenic or endearing, or young, or had been done to death in a particularly elaborate way or in company with an unusually large number of others.

  Roland’s Turkish diplomat was one of these, naturally. Karp penciled the name Tomasian in the proper slot and moved on. He tried to hold to the belief that everyone’s life was equally precious and entitled to the same protection of the law, even though he knew that many of New York’s murder victims were not among those for whom the earth wept when they passed.

  Like this one, for example. Karp frowned and made a tick mark against People v. Morales, and scrawled a note to Lennie Bergman, the A.D.A. in charge. Emilio Morales was a well-known murderous fiend up on East 112th Street. Karp believed he had stabbed any number of his mugging victims and probably killed a few, but he did not believe that Morales had cut the throat of his partner in crime, Snoopy Vega, and then kept the bloody knife and Snoopy’s blood-soaked baseball hat sitting out on the dresser in the bedroom in the apartment he shared with his grandmother and sisters, which was where the cops had said that they found them.

  Instead Karp suspected that the detectives who discovered Vega’s body had decided to rid the city of the rest of the mugging team of Morales & Vega by pinning the hit on the partner. To many cops, one scumbag was like another scumbag. Morales had done killings for which they couldn’t nail him, and now they had one they could plausibly nail him on, with the help of a little planted evidence. Sooner or later they’d get the guy who actually did Vega on some other crime, or maybe the street would save them the trouble. Or maybe Morales actually did do it, in which case it was nicely ironic that he was being framed for it.

  Karp, although a big fan of irony, and although he had blinked at plenty of burglars being sent off for a ritual year in the slams on the basis of planted evidence, did not care to extend the technique to the prosecution of murder. He continued in the quaint belief that every scumbag was different, and that the guy who had done the murder was the one, and the only one, to convict for it. Quite apart from that, and of more practical importance, Karp believed they would lose the case on present evidence.

  Because Morales, in the right for the first time in his miserable life, would hang tough for a trial, and at the trial, even if the case survived a motion to suppress, the defense would chew away at the tainted evidence like a bull terrier on a prowler’s ankle, until something broke. Someone would remember seeing the hat on the street. The grandma, a saintly churchgoer, would testify that she cleaned his room every day and there had been no hat. Morales would have been play
ing hearts with five guys at the time of, and so the cops would have to go out and lean on the five guys to suppress the alibi, which would create more havoc at the trial, and Karp didn’t have enough trial slots to waste on fuck-uppery like this.

  Karp moved on to the next case and the next, building a tottering house of cards that he prayed would see the homicide bureau through another week without either embarrassment or miscarriage of justice beyond the ordinary run. Connie Trask stuck her head in, told him it was five-thirty and that she was leaving if he didn’t want anything. He waved her away with a smile and worked on through the mysteries.

  While Karp worked, Roland Hrcany was laboring in fields even less pleasant, chewing on a Tampa Nugget to keep the smell and his gorge down, and to show some class, while an assistant medical examiner scooped out Mehmet Ersoy’s guts and placed them in a large basin. They were in the autopsy room at the Bellevue morgue, to which Roland had repaired after the press conference. The M.E. was a slight red-haired Irish immigrant named Denny Maher, who liked his work and enjoyed company while he performed it.

  “A good liver,” said Maher, probing the organ, “a rarity in a good liver, so to speak, as our friend here undoubtedly was. A well-nourished Caucasian male indeed. I take it from this that he followed the Prophet’s admonition to abjure the water of life. No poteen for the Turk, and bad cess to ’em. Hah, here’s another one.”

  Maher’s forceps yanked something out of the mass of viscera and dropped it clinking into a kidney basin. There were three others, squat mushroom shapes, the remains of hollow-nose 9mm bullets. Maher spoke the details of his find into the microphone suspended before his face.

  Roland watched impassively as Maher stripped the corpse’s scalp down, cut the top of its head off, and removed the brain. The brain was uninjured, Maher reported, with no gross signs of pathology. He continued his spiel into the microphone, registering his opinion that death was due to exsanguination following the perforation of the anterior aorta and pulmonary arteries by bullets.

  Maher switched the microphone off and quickly sewed up the now hollow places with coarse stitches. His assistant, a morose Puerto Rican, helped him move the body to a gurney, which he then wheeled away to the cold room.

  “Ten hits, I counted,” said Maher, “of which we have four. I presume the others are in the keeping of either the police or the Department of Sanitation. Funny thing, bullets: when I was in the E.R. during my residency, we had a lad who had thirteen bullet wounds in him, and not a one in a vital spot. He walked out in a week. Then we get them done in by a single .22. It’s luck or artistry. This was not an artistic killing, Roland.”

  Hrcany grunted. He already knew the killers were amateurs; he was at the autopsy to see it established that the shots had killed the vic, which was perfectly obvious in the first place.

  “Care for a drop, Roland?” asked Maher brightly. “It would help to underscore the gulf between good Christian men like ourselves and followers of the deplorable Mahound. Sad, that is: his immaculate liver didn’t do him a hair of good, and he’s dead as Murphy’s cat in the prime of life.”

  “You still drinking lab alcohol, Denny?”

  “Of course. It’s nature’s pure stuff, without all those confusing esters and adulterants.”

  Roland shook his head and, while Maher decanted a slug of ethanol into a small beaker, glanced over at another gurney. There was something odd about the shape under its cloth. “What’s that? Another bag of parts?” he asked.

  “No, not at all. But you might be interested in her, Roland, you being a connoisseur of the girls. That’s what you might call an extremely flat-chested woman.”

  He drew the sheet off with a flourish.

  Roland’s teeth clamped down hard on the wooden bit of his Tampa Nugget. “Fascinating, Denny. What the fuck happened to her?”

  “Took a swan dive off a six-story building and landed facedown. Interesting the way the internal organs have jetted out of the body orifices. It’s going to be a messy one to do. The teeth are all over the place, assuming that they’re not still back at the scene. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if I found some lodged in the brain. And of course we’ll need them for an ID. The high school graduation picture won’t do it for this girlie.”

  “A Jane Doe, huh? What, a suicide?”

  “It appears so right now. No sign of foul play is obvious, but of course, the amazing Dr. Maher has not worked his forensic miracles yet.”

  Roland chuckled. “I guess this’ll be one of the ones that doesn’t get fucked by the staff.”

  “Well, as to that,” Maher replied, “there are all sorts of tastes in the profession. I, of course, have never indulged; one imagines it’s much like it is with an Irishwoman, but a bit warmer and without the crying and jabber afterward. Good day to you, Roland.”

  Hrcany left, laughing his booming laugh. Maher’s assistant came in and asked hopefully, “You wanna knock it off for today, Doc?”

  “No, Carlos,” said Maher, “I want to work on our little pancake here. Hose down the table and help me get her on. You can take off at five.”

  At six, Roland Hrcany knocked on the door of Karp’s office and walked in.

  “Well,” Karp said, looking up and rubbing his eyes, “were you on TV? Did they love your golden curls?”

  “I was and they did. Bloom asked where you were.”

  “I bet. He likes to have me where he can see me. How’d it go?”

  “Great, great,” said Hrcany noncommittally. “The usual horseshit. Tomasian’s been booked. We’ll arraign him tonight. I’ll probably want to go to the grand jury early next week.”

  “That fast?”

  “Yeah, why not? We got plenty—or am I missing something?” Hrcany’s bright little blue eyes narrowed.

  Karp took a breath and threw down his pencil. “Roland, what do you say I buy you a drink? You deserve it.”

  Hrcany’s tight expression turned instantly to amazement. “You want to buy me a drink? Butch, we’ve been working together for twelve years. You never bought me a drink before. Come to that, you don’t even drink.”

  Karp rose to his feet and shoveled some folders into a large, ragged cardboard folder that served as his briefcase. “Well, maybe it’s time I started,” he said. He put on his suit jacket and a tan raincoat.

  “She’s giving you a hard time and you want to get your load on before going home, right?”

  “It makes you happy to believe that,” answered Karp mildly, “but really, I figured, you cracked a big case, we’ll sit down, have a beer and talk about it, like regular people.”

  Hrcany had to be satisfied by that explanation. They did, in fact, go to a bar, one in a Chinese restaurant on Bayard Street, a favorite of bail bondsmen, cheap lawyers, and other Criminal Courts habituees. The place was full of these, enjoying after-work drinks, or pre-work drinks, if they were about to handle the late work of the courts, and practicing venality. Karp felt right at home.

  The room was smoky and painted glossy red, with the usual character scrolls, misty paintings on silk, dying snake plants, and very old, thin Chinese men arranged in appropriate places. Karp and Roland settled themselves in a red leatherette booth. A blank-faced Chinese woman appeared instantly and took their order.

  “Roland, I’ve always wanted to know: how come every Chinese restaurant in the world, no matter how crummy, has a fully stocked cocktail lounge?”

  Roland shrugged. “They use them to launder money from Hong Kong and import illegals? I don’t know. It’s part of their plan for world domination.”

  “I thought that was the Jews.”

  “You guys missed your chance,” said Roland. “Too much assimilation. The Chinese don’t make that mistake.” The waitress brought their drinks, a beer for Karp and a Dewars rocks for Hrcany. Karp put some bills out.

  “You see that money?” Roland asked as the waitress swept it up. “Those bills will never touch white skin again. Once it’s in the Chinese community, the money ne
ver leaves.”

  Karp grinned. “You’re an engaging bigot, Roland. Okay, forget the yellow peril. What’s your take on this Armenian and Turkish business?”

  Hrcany drank half his scotch. Offhandedly he replied, “My take? A bunch of nuts, they got out of hand. They were writing letters about something that happened a million years ago, letters to the Turks, I mean. And somebody must have figured, the letters aren’t doing much good, let’s pop one of them, see what happens. They should’ve hired a pro. And for the cherry on top, look at this …”

  Roland reached into his briefcase and pulled out a folder. He handed Karp two pages. “This one’s the transcript of the tape of the call-in of the assassination. The other’s a Xerox of a carbon we lifted from Tomasian’s file cabinet. There’s a typewriter there, and I guarantee you we’ll show it was typed on that machine. Notice any similarities?”

  Karp read the two texts. “I see what you mean. This part about ‘thousands and thousands of the sons and daughters of the Armenian nation, cruelly butchered, cry out for recognition and recompense. If they do not receive their due, then the fighters of the Armenian Secret Army will extract vengeance instead.’ It’s word for word the same in both places. Pretty impressive, Roland. It’ll play great in court.” He handed the papers back and took another sip of beer. “I guess there’s no question that we’re going to have to try this one.”

  “For sure—there’s no hint of a deal. He says he didn’t do it and doesn’t know who did, and I gotta say, he’s a cool little fucker. Compared to the people I usually have up on murder, it’s a pleasure doing business with him. His lawyer’s also right by the book too. Another Armenian, Hagopian his name is. Nice guy, looks like that guy used to do Perry Mason on TV.”

  “Raymond Burr,” said Karp. “You’re in trouble, Roland.”

  Hrcany laughed, “Yeah, right. No, we’ll take him down. And I’ll make another bet: in a little while we’ll pick up the other guy too. Either Tomasian will rat him out, or he’ll do something dumb. Yeah, I know I said he was being cool, but it hasn’t sunk in yet. He hasn’t thought about what it’s going to be like for a nice middle-class boy looking at twenty-five to life with the smokes upstate. Plus, the momma and the daddy and the sisters and whatever haven’t been to work on him yet. He’ll deal. And if not, fuck him, we’ll try and we’ll convict. What’s wrong, you don’t think so?”