Justice Denied

by Robert Tanenbaum

“We were out seeing Kerbussyan. Interesting stuff.”

  “Oh, yeah? Like what?”

  “The vic was selling him art objects. That’s where the money in the safe-deposit box came from. He’d just made a payment of a million on a fancy statue, a holy object of some kind—worth thirty mil apparently.”

  “Ersoy double-crossed him and he had him aced,” said Hrcany confidently.

  “Not according to Mr. K. He claims the deal never went down.”

  “I bet,” said Roland, a sneer in his tone. “And speaking of bets, kiss yours good-bye, sucker. Tomasian admitted the whole thing.”

  Karp’s stomach roiled, and bile filled his throat.

  “What?!”

  “Yeah, today. His roomie in the Tombs gave him up. A check kiter named Dave Medford. Came forward like a good citizen, contacted Frangi, and made a statement.”

  “And you bought it?” Karp said, incredulous.

  “Yeah. Why shouldn’t I buy it?”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Roland! The guy denies everything for months, in jail, and then all of a sudden unburdens to a cell mate? What do you think this Tomasian guy is, a mugger with a sheet? Have you got any corroboration for this guy? Anybody else who heard Tomasian spill his guts? Or any information that wasn’t in the papers?”

  Roland laughed. “I’m hearing a sore loser.”

  Karp struggled for a moment with his growing temper.

  “Roland, tell me I shouldn’t be thinking what I’m thinking right now. Just tell me!”

  “What, you think it’s a plant?” Roland yelled over the phone. “I planted Medford? I set up phony testimony?”

  Karp thought, and it made a sick sweat break out on his forehead and run down his sides beneath his arms. What he thought was that he could not really believe that Roland Hrcany had conspired to suborn perjury, to concoct a fake jailhouse witness. Both he and Roland had trained in Francis P. Garrahy’s hard school, a school that had turned out tough but straight prosecutors for nearly thirty years. Roland’s straightness was perhaps a little wavy on the edges, but if he was truly bent, then the whole business, everything Karp believed in, was meaningless.

  Karp swallowed and said, “No, Roland, I wasn’t accusing you of anything, or even implying. It just seemed, um, overly convenient. This Medford, there’s no deal with him, is there?”

  “I didn’t make any deal. Shit, of course when he goes up, his counsel’s gonna tell the court the mutt did a good deed, maybe get him some slack on sentencing, but what else is new? That’s how it works in snitch land.”

  Which was true. Karp’s head felt full of grout; he was void of any sensible ideas, but he didn’t think that this lapse required him to listen to Roland’s crowing. He cut short the conversation, hung up, and called a local place for a pizza and a Pepsi and a pack of Camel filters. The guard at the main desk called when it arrived, and he hobbled down to get it.

  Fed, he crutched himself slowly through the passageway to the Tombs, to wash the day’s grit off his body. In the steaming shower, he heard the clanking sounds of a man with a mop and steel bucket in the locker room, and when he emerged he saw, as he had expected, that it was Hosie Russell.

  Russell looked at the pack of Camels when Karp proferred them, then at Karp, suspicion in his eyes. But he took the pack and opened it and lit one up, drawing gratefully at the smoke.

  “What you want with me?” Russell said after a few deep puffs.

  It was a good question, but one that Karp could not easily answer. At least he could not give the real answer, which was that he had come to feel, over the past weeks of confinement and isolation, that he and Russell were fellow prisoners.

  He shrugged and said, “I appreciate you being around. If I fell or lost my crutch like last time, I’d have to lie on wet tile until the shift changed. It wouldn’t be much fun.”

  Russell nodded and walked back to his bucket. He swished the mop with practiced ease while Karp clumsily pulled on his clothes. Then Russell stopped and looked carefully at Karp. “I know you,” he said.

  Karp, surprised, smiled and said, “Yeah, sure you do. I’m prosecuting your case.”

  “Naw, not that. I mean from somewheres else.” He thought for a few seconds, his eyes narrowed, his mouth slack. Then he smiled, “Yeah! You that ball player! You played for the Hustlers, in the NBA. Last year. I saw that game you shot that sixty-footer, the Celtics.”

  “Yeah, that. It was a fluke shot.”

  “Yeah, but it went the fuck in. That how you bust your leg, playin’ ball?”

  “In a way. I fucked it up in college ball. Then when I played pro for that little while, it went bad on me.”

  “I played me some ball,” said Russell, smiling. “I played with the Helicopter, that Knowings. Sixty-two, back then, sixty-three. You ever see that man play?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact. I guarded him in Rucker ball once. Summer of sixty-three, I think. Just before I hurt my knee.”

  “You guarded the Helicopter? How’d you do?”

  Karp laughed. “Not too good. I think he scored about forty off me. Guy got a three-second whistle once, he was in the air all the time.”

  Russell laughed too and sat down on the bench across from Karp. “Shit, so you played Rucker League, huh? I pro’lly played you a time or two.”

  “It’s possible, if you were any good.”

  “I could jump over your head, man! I could cut you up.” He stood up abruptly and did a little basketball dance, miming the ball—fake, shift, pump fake, jump, release.

  “You convinced me,” said Karp. “Anyway, those days are gone forever. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to walk right on this piece of junk, much less play ball.”

  “Yeah, but at least you got a shot in the pros. How the fuck you do that, old as you are?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Karp. “How’d you get into the mugging business?”

  Russell shot him a dark look, then relaxed. “How? Well, first I didn’t get into fuckin’ Harvard, then my daddy lost his millions in the stock market. How the fuck you think, man? Just scufflin’, tryin’ to get by. Like everybody else up in the ghet-to.”

  “Not everybody. It was everybody, this place’d be the size of the Chrysler Building.”

  “Hey, you don’t know what you talkin’ about, white man,” snapped Russell, his voice rising.

  “You’re probably right,” said Karp equably. “So tell me. What’s it like? The mugging business.”

  “Why the fuck you care? You tryin’ somethin’?”

  “No. There’s nothing I have to try. I got my case against you, and I think it’s a good one, and next week I’m going to prosecute it and try to send you away for twenty-five. I can’t talk to you about the case. Nothing that passes between us can come out in court. In fact, if your counsel knew I was sitting here talking to you, he’d have a shit fit.”

  “So why’re you doin’ it, then?”

  Karp shifted his shoulders and settled his bad leg more comfortably. “I don’t know—I’m stuck here. You’re sure as hell stuck here. I could go watch TV at the guard station, but I’d have to watch what they were watching, which I’ve done already. You could finish mopping and go back to your cell, but you probably don’t find that much of a thrill anymore. Or we could just sit here and shoot the shit for a while. No big thing.”

  “They come for me, I don’t get back there in a little.”

  “No problem. I know the captain. I’ll cover it. No, the thing is, I’m curious. I must’ve put ten thousand guys like you in jail, and I never spent any time talking with them—just enough to make the case. And they sure as shit didn’t want to talk to me.”

  Russell’s face stiffened, and he threw the butt of his cigarette hissing into a damp corner of the locker room. “Well, fuck your ‘curious’! I ain’t no fuckin’ museum.”

  Karp nodded and extended his lower lip in the have-it-your-way expression, finished tying his sneaker, got his crutches under his armpi
ts, and stood up. “In that case, see you in court, Hosie,” he said amiably, and carried himself, careful of the wet patches, out the door.

  The same evening, Marlene, entering her shadowy loft, was greeted by a scene of touching, if unconventional, domesticity. Harry Bello was lying asleep on the red sofa, and his goddaughter was sleeping facedown on his chest, her face resting on his neck and her little butt stuck up in the air.

  Actually, she observed, coming nearer, Harry was not sleeping at all, or perhaps he had awakened, instantly and without motion, just as she entered. She could see tiny glints of the pale evening glow from the skylight reflected from his eyes.

  Without a word Marlene scooped up her daughter and put her in her crib. When she returned, Harry was up, standing and rolling his shoulders to release the kinks. There was a damp patch of baby drool around his collar. He walked over to the rack above the stove that held Marlene’s pans and utensils and retrieved his revolver, which he had hung there to keep it away from Lucy’s tiny trigger fingers.

  “World’s safest baby-sitter,” said Marlene. “Thanks, Harry. A buck fifty an hour all right?”

  Harry made a hmmp and said, “Do any good?”

  Marlene told him the good they’d done at Kerbussyan’s.

  Harry didn’t comment on this information but said, “I saw our guy, that Duane, today.”

  “Yeah? Where?”

  “Right here, when I brought the kid home. He was sitting on his bike, corner of Crosby and Broome. I called it in, but he took off before the blue-and-white got here. I wasn’t gonna chase him with Lucy.”

  “She would’ve been thrilled, probably. The youngest assist on a collar in NYPD history. She could’ve whined at him until he gave it up.”

  Harry was not amused. “It’s you. He’s checking you out for the other one.”

  Marlene did not want to hear this. In general, prosecutors are, oddly enough, the safest of the participants in criminal justice. Witnesses get killed, cops get killed, mutts shoot their own lawyers, occasionally somebody goes after a judge, but the D.A.’s don’t seem to attract much violence. It is as if the nature of the job—that D.A.’s are by profession prosecutors—prevents, by a sort of vaccination, the violently inclined from seeing them as maliciously inspired, and fit subjects for vengeance.

  On the other hand, Marlene had been blown up (if mistakenly) and kidnapped, and Karp had been shot, although if the truth be told, they had been asking for it by straying from the safety of jurisprudence and into direct contact with the criminals in question on the street.

  She said, “You don’t know that, Harry. He could live in the neighborhood. Tribeca, SoHo—good places to get lost.”

  “I’m staying,” said Harry.

  Marlene was about to object, reflexively, but stopped herself. It was actually a terrific idea—good for Harry, good for her and the baby. And he had a car.

  She made up a bed for him in the gym, on a stack of exercise pads, good for the lower spine. As she was about to leave him, he said, offhand, “I forgot to tell you. Our Turk’s got a cousin.”

  “Which Turk, the vic?”

  “No, the one with the high life. Djelal.”

  “So? He has a cousin, what about him?”

  “Guy runs a restaurant on East Forty-six. Vic ate there all the time. Ate there the day he died. The Izmir.”

  “And?”

  “Guy used to manage it, but he bought the place three months ago. Paid cash. Nobody I talked to could figure out where he got the money.”

  Marlene grinned nastily. “Yeah, and he doesn’t work for the U.N.”

  14

  A terrible crime has been committed,” said Milton Freeland, looking at the jury, stoking the sincerity. “We all feel for Susan Weiner and her family. How can such things happen in broad daylight? we ask ourselves. We all want justice for Susan Weiner.”

  Do we? thought Karp. He looked sideways at Hosie Russell, sitting at the adjoining table. He looked a lot better than he had in the harsh light of the locker room. He was neatly dressed in a suit and tie and wearing the glasses. Karp wondered whether their lenses were really ground to a prescription or if Freeland kept a stack of odd peepers in his desk for show.

  Karp had thought that Freeland would go the emotional route. Karp had not done so in his own opening. He never did. The opening for the prosecution should be dry, like a table of contents: first I say what I’m gonna say; then I say it; then I say what I just said. You wanted the impression of a carefully woven, mutually supporting net of facts; leave the emotion to the defense. Good advice, given ten years ago by an old homicide D.A. who had helped train Karp.

  Freeland was pacing slowly before the jury, drawing out the words, as if each one had popped that instant from the oven of his warm heart. “… yes, a young woman was brutally murdered—there’s no doubt about that. And the state will try to show that my client, Mr. Russell, is that murderer.

  “Indeed, they must show it, beyond a reasonable doubt; that is Mr. Karp’s job. It is his show. I could sit here sleeping during the trial, and so could Mr. Russell, and it would not matter. My client is innocent until proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt. That is what the prosecution must do. But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that proof will be impossible if you are the reasonable and decent people I know you to be. Because Mr. Russell is innocent of this dreadful crime.

  “He stands accused today for one reason and one reason only—he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He fell victim to the fervid desire of the police to find a culprit, any culprit for this spectacular and highly publicized murder in the shortest possible time.

  “Mr. Russell was ideal for this purpose. He is poor. He is homeless. He has severe emotional problems. And he is black.”

  As Freeland said this, Karp knew, he would be looking directly and intently into the eyes of the three black members of the jury. Karp thought back to the voir dire. The jury selection had taken five days, probably longer than the trial itself would take. Karp thought the whole thing was a waste of time nine times out of ten, but the voir dire was dear to lawyers, especially defense lawyers, who almost always believed that they had a mystical ability to pick an acquitting jury. Also, it was to the defense’s advantage to drag the thing out as long as possible, especially in a case that depended as much as this one did on the testimony of witnesses.

  Reasonable doubt—Freeland had to cultivate it like a gardener. All he needed to win was one tender green shoot, and time was the best fertilizer. What? You mean to tell us that you can remember a face you saw once, five weeks or ten weeks, or eight months ago? So Freeland had used all his peremptory challenges to fill the jury with people who might be swayed by the idea that the cops had dragged in the first available brother off the street, and Karp, of course, had tried for a group of solid taxpayers.

  Neither had succeeded, of course; the jury was what might have been pulled out of a hat. Freeland had got his college student with collar-length hair and his matronly black woman. Karp thought that his black security guard captain and his black retired schoolteacher would provide a balance, and do the right thing. Freeland was going to play the race thing up, and so hadn’t objected to the two black men. That might have been a mistake, Karp thought. But he only had to hit once.

  Freeland was well into his peroration. “… and I think, I know, you will conclude that Hosie Russell’s only crime was being one of society’s forgotten men. He is as much a victim as Susan Weiner, a victim of the desire of the police and the prosecution to find a scapegoat that would get the press off their backs. But the real killer of Susan Weiner still walks free. If you convict the wrong man, you will be denying that young woman justice. If you listen to the prosecution’s illogical tale of concocted evidence and mistaken, so-called, witnesses, if you give it a moment’s credence, then you will be compounding injustice and denying justice forever to the victim of this horrible crime. Thank you very much.”

  Karp stood up. The crutches cramped his st
yle. He liked to move forcefully from evidence table to witness stand to jury box during a trial, confident that his size and athletic movements would rivet attention and keep the duller jurors awake.

  He called the first witness, a civil engineer. This was a departure from the usual practice. Since it was a legal necessity to show that a murder had in fact taken place in New York County, the early witnesses were generally those who could establish that fact—the medical examiner and other forensic experts. But Karp wanted first to establish the scene of Russell’s capture firmly in the jury’s mind from the outset, because the only reasonable defense was that the man found in the basement under the boiler was not the man whom the crowd had chased from the murder scene and who had briefly invaded the apartment of Jerry Shelton.

  He led the engineer, a thin, scholarly man with wire glasses, through the layout of the apartment complex at 58 Barrow and introduced as an exhibit a large chart showing the building’s floor plans. Freeland peppered him with meaningless objections, all of which were overruled. Freeland still hadn’t caught on that Judge Martino liked dispatch and a thorough understanding of how trials got done in the big city.

  Freeland’s questions on cross were, of course, directed at establishing reasonable routes of escape for the putative other man. He chose the one Karp had expected: the skylight at the top of the stairs.

  Freeland asked, “Now, sir, there is a skylight at the top of the stairs there, leading to the roof, is there not?”

  The engineer confirmed this and pointed it out on the exhibit when asked. He agreed that once on the roof there were a half-dozen routes down to the street or across other rooftops to other streets.

  Then he asked whether a man could get up out of the skylight, and Karp snapped an objection, rising briefly on his good foot. Calls for a conclusion based upon speculation. Sustained.

  The next witness was the police photographer—routine. The photographs of the murder site and the Barrow Street complex, then the knife were duly admitted into evidence. The next witness was Ray Thornby, the arresting officer. But it was by then four-fifteen, and Judge Martino adjourned for the day.