Justice Denied

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Of course,” agreed Kerbussyan, “it is a delicate position. But let us say only that you are not convinced that Aram is guilty. You have no wish to discommode your colleague, who is convinced. So what must you do? Obviously, you must find the person who actually did the shooting of this Turk.” He shrugged and smiled. “But of such things I can tell you nothing. If I may say so, a visit to an elderly Armenian seems an unprofitable way to advance your investigation.”

  Karp’s irritation increased. He was being played with in an insultingly obvious way. He said, “Not if he’s the local head of the Armenian Secret Army.”

  To his surprise, Kerbussyan laughed, a dry sound like a bronchial attack. “Ah, yes, that. Tell me, Mr. Karp, what do you imagine the Armenian Secret Army to be?”

  “I have no idea. I’ll bet you could tell me, though.”

  Another chuckle. “Yes, but then it wouldn’t be a secret, would it? All right, enough fencing. May I assume you have some knowledge of the Armenian genocide? Yes? Very good. One of history’s great crimes, but now almost forgotten. ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’ You know who said that? Adolf Hitler. The reasoning is clear. The Armenians were ignored and forgotten and so would the Jews be when they were all dead.

  “You are yourself Jewish, are you not, Mr. Karp? A good deal in common, the Jews and the Armenians, and not just the disasters of the present century. Do you know that of all the ancient peoples of the Near East mentioned by Herodotus twenty-five hundred years ago, the Cappadocians, the Lydians, the Phoenicians, the Phrygians, and the rest, the only ones to survive into modern times with their cultural identity intact are the Armenians and the Jews? One wonders why.

  “It is easier to see why a people obsessed by national survival and the imagined wrongs of history, like the Germans and Turks, should conceive a hatred for the champions of survival and wish to destroy them. Perhaps it is similar to what I have heard of cannibals who seek to obtain the virtues of their enemies by eating their flesh.

  “The great difference, of course, is that the genocide of the Jews was exposed by the victorious powers in the second war, and that, overcome with guilt, those powers provided the Jews with an independent nation. The Germans admitted their crimes and paid compensation to the victims. Little enough, but the world attempted some justice. You should not be surprised that Armenians want the same.”

  The old man paused and looked at Karp with his deep and level gaze. This speech was a distraction, but from what? Or perhaps the old man thought it was the point. They had in any case drifted far from Tomasian’s predicament. The silence continued. Karp said, “You mean they want a homeland?”

  “I think there are some that do. The liberation of western Armenia. But it is complex. There are no Armenians left in that country to liberate, and of course, politically it is impossible; Armenia is a Soviet republic. The Turks are allied to the West. And besides, the Armenians are not like the Jews, or like the Jews imagine themselves to be. There is no serious Armenian Zionism, the tie to a particular piece of land. In the eleventh century, when the Seljuk Turks conquered Armenia, much of the nation moved five hundred miles south and founded another Armenia in the Taurus Mountains. The people, that is what counts, the people and the language and the Church.”

  “So what do you want?”

  The old man’s eyes flashed briefly. “A confession. From the Turks. That it happened. That they owe compensation. So, in our cause, Turks are killed. The Turkish ambassadors in Vienna, in Paris, in the Vatican. The consul in Beirut. The director of Turkish espionage in the Middle East.”

  “And Ersoy?”

  Kerbussyan smiled and shook his head slowly. “Not Ersoy. As you know very well. And also, if an Armenian group wished to kill a Turkish official in New York, which would be a stupidity uncharacteristic of such a group, let me assure you that it would not have been done as this was done, and Aram would not have been the assassin. Not someone who is on record as writing letters of protest.”

  “And the weapons … ?”

  “Mr. Karp, Aram travels to Europe and the Near East several times a year. He carries bags full of gems. He is well known to customs officials, and his paperwork is always impeccable….” Kerbussyan made a graceful gesture with his hand, indicating a caesura into which a thought might be inserted.

  “You’re saying he runs guns?”

  “You are saying it, Mr. Karp. But supposing an Armenian nationalist organization possessed an asset like Aram Tomasian. Wouldn’t he be the very last person to risk in a venture such as the crime in question?”

  Karp didn’t know. He thought not, but then he wasn’t a terrorist leader. Maybe that was exactly what a terrorist would do. On the other hand, it was an additional confirmation of his feeling that Tomasian had been purposely framed. He decided to voice this to his host, since they were pretending to be frank.

  “Okay, say I buy that. It means that someone went out of their way to frame your boy. Who would do that? I mean, who among the people who wanted Ersoy dead?”

  Kerbussyan appeared to consider this for a moment, nodding, his face all amused concentration. “Those are two separate questions. First, we are not sure that Ersoy was a target. Perhaps Aram is the target, or the Armenian community generally. Any Turk would have done just as well for that. And Ersoy was obvious, accessible, and regular in his movements. As for motive, whether the Turks would like to discredit the Armenians, the question is hardly worth asking.”

  “You think they killed their own guy to smear the Armenians?”

  Kerbussyan made a dismissive gesture. “I don’t say that. But they are a violent and inexplicable people. They have a military government with many quarrelsome factions. Perhaps someone wished to kill two birds with one stone.”

  As Karp thought about that possibility, an ornate clock on a side table chimed a clear note. Kerbussyan shifted in his chair and said, “That is really all the advice I can give at this time, sir. If you will excuse me, I have one of my infrequent appointments.”

  Karp rose, as did Kerbussyan, and they shook hands formally across the desk. Karp felt as if he had just completed an unsuccessful loan interview, which was not a way he liked to feel. As a result, instead of leaving amid polite pleasantries, he looked the old man in the eye and asked, “What about the money? The million dollars in Ersoy’s safe-deposit box. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  Kerbussyan’s face assumed a look of polite confusion. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

  Karp nodded curtly and left the room. The old guy was good, you had to give him that. He had played Karp nicely, giving away as little as possible, and only those things that would steer Karp in the direction he wanted him steered. Admitting Tomasian was a gun runner was good, and probably true. It cast a cloak of sincerity over the conversation, and over the suggestion that the killing might be a Turkish operation.

  The servant entered and stood by the door. Karp followed her out, passing as he did so two stocky, scowling men wearing field jackets and handlebar mustaches. Terrorists in training.

  Karp got back into the car, awakened the driver, and was conducted back to the City. Mulling over what Kerbussyan had said about the motive for Ersoy’s death, Karp decided that it might be worth at least poking around in that direction. On the other hand, he had an instinct for the culpable lie, arguably the most valuable, to a criminal prosecutor, of all the subtle talents. The old man had indeed been frank about a number of things, but when he had said that he did not know about the slain Turk’s hoard of money, he had been lying through his teeth.

  When Karp returned to his office, he found a distraught Tony Harris waiting for him. The young man looked as if he had just lost his family in a freak accident: he was pale and sweating and his eyes were hollow. A bearing less like that of the ordinarily chipper Harris could hardly be imagined.

  “I got wiped in Devers,” Harris blurted out when Karp came in. So he had not lost a loved one, but a murder case,
and one that should have been a lock. Karp gestured Harris into his private office and sat down behind his desk. His knee was throbbing again.

  “What do you mean ‘wiped,’ Tony?”

  “Wiped! Case dismissed. The fuck-head walked out smiling and shot me the finger. God! Those witnesses! I sweated bullets getting them to testify. I swore to them; I swore it was a lock, that Devers was sure to go away for twenty. Now they’re gonna see him every day on the street. Or worse. Probably worse.”

  Harris looked like he was about to burst into tears. Karp understood the man’s agony, if he had never shared it. He said, “How did it go down? This was at pretrial?”

  “Yeah, the Legal Aid, Conyers, goes up for motions. I figured it was gonna be the old horseshit about the gun, its association with the defendant and all. But no, he moves to dismiss the eyewitness testimony. I was standing there like a frog on a rock. I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

  “What grounds?”

  “People v. Hachett. I never heard of it. On lineups. Basically it holds that in lineups, where witnesses have specifically identified an item of clothing worn by the alleged perpetrator, such an item can’t be worn at the lineup, so the witness supposedly IDs the perp, not the clothes. When I did the lineups down at the station house, Devers was wearing a leather hip-length coat. The two girls, it turns out, mentioned the coat to the cops, but the cops never mentioned it to me. I mean we had the guy. The girls knew him, for chrissake, and so did the lady in the hallway. So he went into the lineup in the coat. That was it. The whole fucking case trashed. Oh, yeah, Freeland was there too, enjoying the hell out of it, it looked like.”

  “Freeland? He was there?”

  “Yeah, he waltzed in and talked to Conyers.”

  “The son of a bitch. He must have been in on it.”

  “In on what?” asked Harris.

  “The scam. You were royally fucked, kid. Swindled.”

  “How? I saw the case. I read it. The judge read it. It was real. I mean, you could argue with the application, but—”

  “Hackett’s an Appellate Division case,” Karp interrupted.

  “Yeah, I realize that, Butch; that’s the fucking problem, they threw out the conviction on Hackett,” replied Harris impatiently.

  “It was reversed by the Court of Appeals.”

  Harris opened his mouth, but no words came out. It was an old trick. New York calls its lowest felony courts “Supreme Court,” and the first level of appeal is called the Appellate Division. The actual supreme judicial authority in the state is called the Court of Appeals. A Supreme Court decision can thus be reversed by the Appellate Division and confirmed by the Court of Appeals, and although every lawyer licensed to practice in the state has explained this odd nomenclature on the bar exam, people still get confused, even judges.

  Harris still looked stunned. He was pale and shaking his head. Karp, controlling his genuine rage, made his tone gentle.

  “Okay, there’s no use crying over it. You got robbed. I’ll have some words with Mr. Freeland tomorrow. You should take off. Go home. Get drunk.”

  “I can’t. I’m on call this afternoon until eight.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’re in no shape to do intakes. Scram. No, really—out. I’ll cover the shift.”

  Amid protestations, not very sincere ones, Harris was packed off.

  Karp had now traded an afternoon of sedentary desk minding for a long evening that might require considerable mobility. He had done this as much for himself as for Harris. That morning he had made an appointment for an arthroscopy, an investigative procedure that was sure to be followed by a major operation, one that was not certain to succeed. A week hence he would be disabled. In a couple of months he might find himself a cripple.

  These thoughts bred in him an almost desperate desire to move, to act, to get away from papers and negotiation, to walk on the bloody margins of crime scenes, to talk with cops and skells, to breathe smoke and kick ass, while he still could.

  All in all, therefore, given Karp’s record, and this extra rocket up his pants, it was probably not the best afternoon in the year to murder somebody on the isle of Manhattan.

  Murder was little on the mind of the man in the blue shirt as he walked carefully down the sunny aisle of Hudson Street, looking for a victim. He had most of a fifth of white port sliding through his body, cranking him up, giving him confidence. Two months out of Elmira, he was back at his chosen profession, purse snatching. He’d just quit his straight job, humping stuff at a warehouse. Actually, they’d canned him for being late too much. His daughter had booted him out on the street, and he had missed a meet with his parole officer. He had to score something today so he could get a place, and maybe find another job humping so the bitch of a parole officer wouldn’t be on his case.

  The West Village was a good place for it. Plenty of rich women by themselves. He needed a handbag off a rich white lady. Or a skinny faggot. Grab him, shove him in a doorway, take the purse, the wallet, the watch. Take all of two minutes.

  He crossed 10th Street, moving north. At the corner a couple of obvious out-of-towners, a youngish couple, stood talking and studying a map. The woman had a shoulder bag.

  The man in the blue shirt looked them over. The man was big and athletic-looking. It would’ve been a possibility with a gun, but all he had was a cheap kitchen knife with a five-inch blade. Besides, he didn’t much like guns.

  The man with the tourist map looked up and stared at him. He had nasty blue eyes and close-cut reddish hair. He looked southern, looked like he could handle himself. The man in the blue shirt passed on.

  There she was. His heart accelerated and his gut roiled, as might happen to a man upon catching sight of a lover. A young woman, pretty, in a light coat, maxiskirt, and polished boots. A large, expensive-looking leather bag hung from a strap at her shoulder. She was moving right toward him on the sidewalk.

  Now she turned and approached the entrance to an apartment building. This was perfect. All he had to do was follow her into the doorway and, when she stopped to open the outer door, lift the bag and take off.

  She stood in front of the glass door and opened the bag to extract her keys. He made his move. She must have seen his reflection in the glass of the door, for she whirled to face him, her mouth opening.

  He grabbed for the bag, caught its strap, and yanked hard, hoping to pull the woman off her feet. But she had wedged herself into a corner of the doorway and set her heels. And she had started screaming.

  Echoing off the buildings, the screams seemed as loud as sirens. They hurt his ears. He heard footsteps behind him, and someone shouted. He let go of the strap and grabbed the woman’s coat with his left hand and pulled his knife out of the waistband of his jeans and flashed it in her face. She screamed louder. He had to stop that noise. He stabbed her in her chest. She gave a last cry when he did this, different in tone from her screams for aid, a shriek like a baby’s mindless call. Slowly she turned away from him and sank to her knees, still clutching the bag.

  He cursed and stabbed her again, in the back, the force of the blow knocking her flat. She turned on her side and drew up her knees. Now she was quiet. The man in the blue shirt picked up his prize from the woman’s limp hands and turned. A black man in a leather apron stood on the sidewalk in front of the shop adjacent to the woman’s apartment building. There was shock and rage on his face. The man in the blue shirt spun away from him and ran south on Hudson Street. He heard shouts, and more screams, and the sound of running feet behind him.

  On the sidewalk in front of her apartment house, Susan Weiner’s perfect little life drained away in a widening red pool.

  8

  It is an old-fashioned hue and cry, the kind of thing that isn’t supposed to happen in New York anymore because people don’t care. The man in the blue shirt runs south on Hudson and turns east on Christopher, heading for the twisty little streets and alleys of the West Village. A half-dozen people run after him, shouti
ng. The amazed faces of the tourist couple flash by his eyes as he runs, clutching the handbag under his arm like a football.

  The block of Christopher east of Hudson is a short one. The man cuts sharply across the street, runs down Bedford, and turns east on Barrow. If he can get under cover before his pursuers reach the corner of Barrow and Bedford, he might be safe. A sunken courtyard at 58 Barrow catches his eye, and he dashes down its steps. There is a restaurant built partially out over the courtyard, casting it into deep shade. Two doors lead from the courtyard. He chooses the one on the right and pounds on it.

  A young man opens the door. He is an actor expecting a delivery of moo goo gai pan from a nearby Chinese take-out. He smiles and says, “Hi. What do I owe you?” The killer pushes by him and runs through the small apartment. He is no longer thinking very clearly, or even as clearly as he normally does, which is not with any particular depth or lucidity. The idea of escape fills his entire mind. Here fortune favors him. There is a door opening into the interior of the building, and he goes through it and up two flights to where the stairs end in a small landing, under a skylight.

  By now he is exhausted. He rests for a moment, panting, and rummages through the handbag. He tears a thin sheaf of currency from the wallet he finds there, seven dollars in all, and thrusts it into his pocket. He tosses the knife and the bag into a corner of the stairwell. He listens; the building remains silent. He begins to walk quietly down the stairs and stops, because he has just had a thought. He strips off his blue shirt and throws it into a corner with the other stuff. He is wearing a bright red T-shirt underneath it.

  The killer walks down the stairs, past the door to the young man’s apartment, and down a dimly lit corridor. He sees a door, opens it, and finds himself again in the courtyard. The young actor is standing there. He has gathered around him a crowd of people, the remains of the crowd who had chased the man in the blue shirt from Hudson Street. They are exchanging experiences. The young man looks up, sees the killer, and shouts. The killer darts back through the door.