Justice Denied

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Marlene said, “It’s okay. He always does that.”

  “What, puke his guts?”

  Marlene nodded. “When he kills people.”

  Harry said nothing. He was pretty sure that if Raney had missed, if he had hit Lucy, Harry would have taken his own gun and killed Vinnie, Raney, and himself, in that order. He put the thought out of his mind and helped Marlene to her feet. Then he went to his car and called the incident in on the police radio.

  Karp had slept through the whole thing: the screaming, the shot, the sirens. Raney and Bello said they would handle the clean-up and the various official acts New York considers necessary when one of its citizens has his brains blown over one of its streets. Marlene returned to the loft alone. She got the baby interested in some toys in her playpen and poured herself a tumbler full of red wine. Which she drank and poured another.

  There was still dinner to get, she thought, horrific event or no, and, naturally, she had not gone to the store. She was not going to go either. Maybe she would never leave her loft again.

  No food in the house. Of course, there is always food in the house. She found half a Spanish onion, some faded escarole, and a chunk of salt pork. There was a bulb of garlic and olive oil.

  She gets down an iron pot, splashes in some oil, cuts up the onion, chops in half the garlic and the salt pork, and puts the pieces in the oil, with the gas on low. She doesn’t know what she is going to cook yet, but she knows that it is going to involve garlic and onions.

  There was a can of tomatoes and one of tomato paste. Impossible there should not be, in Marlene’s kitchen. She pulls out a handful of dry spaghetti, but sees it is not enough for two and puts it back. She had been going to shop for pasta today.

  There is a bag of flour. She gets out her largest pottery bowl and pours a mound of flour into it. She adds water and an envelope of yeast and makes dough. The dough rises, and she scours the back of the refrigerator and comes up with a bag of dried mushrooms and the end of an ancient sausage. She cuts the moldy parts from the sausage. The knife shakes in her hand, and she works slowly.

  She opens the can of tomatoes, drains it, and dumps the contents into a steel sieve. She pushes the tomatoes through the sieve into a bowl. The pulp is brighter in color and in texture not very much like Vinnie’s brains blown out across Crosby Street. Nevertheless, vomit rises in her throat, and she has to stop for a moment and lean over the table on her knuckles, breathing, her eyes closed. Then she throws the tomatoes into the pot, adds oregano and bay, covers the pot, and turns the flame down to sharp blue dots.

  Karp wakes up and rises, attracted by the sounds and the odors. He comes into the kitchen on one crutch.

  “What’d you get?” he asks.

  “I didn’t get anything.”

  He sees her face. “What happened?” he says in alarm.

  She takes a deep breath and tells him. He’s horrified, guilt-stricken. He looks at the child, who is in her playpen, banging two blocks together and crooning to herself.

  “She’s fine,” says Marlene. “She’s forgotten it already.”

  He senses Marlene doesn’t want to discuss it now. “What’s for dinner, then?” he asks.

  “Pizza,” she says.

  He is amazed. She amazes him further by pounding out the risen dough and flinging it up in the air. She has done this before, but never for him. A certain ethnic embarrassment: during the summer of her fourteenth year she did it fifty times a day at the restaurant owned by her father’s brother in Belmar, New Jersey. It is obviously something you don’t forget how to do, because Marlene can still do it.

  She flings the dough high in the air again and again. Karp and the baby watch this, rapt. The dough enters the realm of pure ballistics, suns and galaxies tug at it. It becomes round and thin. Not a fast food this pizza.

  Marlene puts it in a greasy pan and pours her sauce on it, and the mushrooms, escarole, and sausage. She bakes it. They eat, baby Lucy chewing on a crust.

  By the time they have finished, Marlene is calm again, but changed, in the way this life has been changing her for some years. Ever less Smith, ever more Sicily.

  17

  Dropping five stories on a wire was not Karp’s idea of how to start a day when he was on a trial. It did not make him feel like Peter Pan, especially since the belt slipped during the descent and he had to dangle in mid-shaft for a half hour while two employees of the wire factory on the third floor labored, amid loud Spanish controversy, to repair the fault.

  When he emerged from the shaft gate, his brow was dark, and his police driver decided not to express any of the several cute remarks he had thought of while observing these events.

  Marlene remained in the loft. She had called in sick, although there was nothing physically wrong with her. But if she could not take a mental health day after a weekend during which her child had been assaulted by a gigantic felon, when could she? She spent the morning lounging comfortably in bed, drinking coffee and sharing TV cartoons and cookies with the baby.

  Karp passed his morning less pleasantly, finishing up the official witnesses in People v. Russell: Thornby, the arresting officer; Marrano, the cop who had taken the famous blue shirt, the victim’s handbag, and the knife to the station house; Cimella, the detective who had received all this, plus the sales slip found on Russell; and two men from the medical examiner’s office, who established that Susan Weiner had died of stab wounds and that the wounds were consistent with the knife found on the stairway of 58 Barrow, and that the stains on the knife blade were human blood.

  The cross went as Karp expected. Freeland pounded away at the time issue. The implication he was trying to plant in the jury’s collective mind was that the cops had found the handbag where the real killer (not Russell) had dumped it, found the sales slip within, and lied that they had found it on the defendant four hours or so before the bag had been located.

  At least the trial was moving. Freeland had at last exceeded Judge Martino’s level of tolerance, and Martino had responded in a way that did the defense no good. After a particularly fruitless and time-wasting series of questions about an alternate blood-testing system addressed to the medical examiner’s blood pathologist, a man of magisterial expertise, Martino had called counsel to the bench.

  “Mr. Freeland, what is the purpose of this line of questioning?” asked the judge.

  “Your Honor, my purpose here is to draw out for the jury the failure of the medical examiner to test for blood type from the stains on the knife purportedly found.”

  “The witness states that the amount of blood was too little for those tests.”

  “Yes, but I’ve located articles in the Journal of Forensic Medicine—”

  “Mr. Freeland, the witness has stated that those tests are not accepted by his profession.”

  “Yes, Your Honor, but—”

  “Mr. Freeland, do you know what an expert witness is?”

  Freeland flushed, coughed, and said, “Of course, Judge.”

  “I don’t think you do. An expert witness is assumed credible when speaking within the confines of his expertise. You have spent half an hour questioning him about the validity of tests that he says are garbage, despite repeated objections by the People, which I have sustained. If you wish to challenge the expertise of the People’s witness, the appropriate measure is to call an expert of your own. Do you plan to do so?”

  “Uh, no, Your Honor, not at this time. But, Your Honor—”

  “Be quiet, sir! Let me ask you, have you ever tried a homicide case before?”

  Freeland’s face was brick now. “Uh, no, sir, this is my first.”

  “It’ll be your last in my court if you don’t stop wasting my time. Unreasonable delay and contentiousness for its own sake are not acceptable strategies in this court.” Martino paused for a beat. “And I want to say that if you can’t cut it, I will have you replaced as counsel by reason of incompetence.”

  Points for the judge, thought Karp, moving back to his
seat. The threat of removal for incompetence would be particularly telling when counsel was the new head of the local Legal Aid Society office. He looked over at the defense table. Freeland was thumbing through notes and making marks. His color was back to normal, and he seemed relaxed for someone who had just had his shorts fried by a judge.

  Marlene let the phone ring. It was lunchtime, and she was feeding the baby mashed bananas. But when the message machine clicked on and she heard the voice, she abandoned Lucy in her high chair and raced to the phone.

  “Ms. Ciampi? I’m so sorry to disturb you at home, but I thought it was important.”

  “No problem,” said Marlene. “What’s up, Mr. Sokoloff?”

  “A gentleman called on me today. He presented himself as an associate of Mr. Ersoy’s, with similar contacts. He said his name was Nassif.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He had some things to sell. A very nice figured reliquary in silver—Armenian, fourteenth century. And some Byzantine coins ranging from the ninth to the fourteenth century. The reliquary is real, I believe, but the coins are not.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I, ah, said I had to consult with some potential customers. I invited him to call on me tomorrow.”

  “Very good, Mr. Sokoloff, that’s very helpful. Look, I need to talk to some people and then Ill get back to you.”

  Clever man, thought Marlene after he had bid her good-bye. Just the right move to dispatch any lingering doubts about the complicity of Sokoloff Galleries in a set of art frauds that may or may not have led to a murder.

  Marlene got on the phone then and spoke with V.T. and then with Rodriguez, the art fraud cop, setting up a sting. Then she called Sokoloff back and told him what he had to do.

  Lucy during this period had managed to cover herself and every object within range of her flinging power with a thin slime of sticky banana. Marlene laughed, hugged the child to her, stripped both Lucy and herself, and plunged the two of them into the bathtub.

  In the afternoon, Karp presented his last official witness, Tony Chelham, the jail officer for whom Russell had identified his blue shirt. This was critical because all the witnesses who had seen Hosie Russell fleeing the murder scene and entering 58 Barrow Street had seen a man in such a shirt: the Digbys from Lexington, the actor Jerry Shelton, and James Turnbull, the leather shop owner. Karp brought those forward during the remainder of the afternoon. They all did well, both on direct and on cross. Freeland’s only option, since they had all obviously seen someone, was to suggest that whomever they had seen, it was not the defendant.

  He implied that, to the Digbys, all black people looked alike. He implied that Shelton, a homosexual actor living in Greenwich Village, was probably besotted with drugs as a matter of course—he actually asked whether Shelton had been smoking marijuana on the afternoon in question. He implied that Turnbull, who had spontaneously identified Russell in the police station and had attacked him as the murderer, had been put up to it by the police, which implication Turnbull, a man of immense dignity and presence, passionately rejected.

  It was not a particularly good cross, thought Karp. Freeland appeared to be drifting; a lot of his questions didn’t lead anywhere in particular, as if he was just going through the motions. It didn’t help him that the witnesses were all solid citizens. Attacking such witnesses tended to piss off the jury, composed of the similarly solid.

  After Turnbull stepped down, Karp said, “Your Honor, that is the People’s case.”

  Martino excused the jury, Freeland made the expected motion to dismiss, which was rejected, and Karp was through for the day, at least with trials. He went back to his office and caught up on paperwork until seven, ordered take-out Chinese, ate it, and clumped off to the jail to take a shower.

  He tried not to think about the trial. There is a certain letdown after the presentation of a major case, and it was entirely possible to drive oneself into a frenzy of doubt about the various errors that could have been made, and which might even now be bubbling in the minds of the jurors, cooking away at an acquittal.

  The case had weaknesses, of course: no witness had turned up from the crowd who had actually followed Russell from the murder scene to 58 Barrow, although the police had seen dozens of people doing so. The guy on the bike—who had told Thornby that a man was hiding in that building—was a particularly unfortunate no-show, and the cops, urged on by Karp, had tried strenuously to locate him.

  And, of course, Freeland still had his turn at bat. Karp had no idea what the defense was going to present; Freeland had flatly refused to tell Karp who his witnesses, if any, were going to be. There was no point in speculating.

  Karp turned off the water and reached for his towel. He found himself, surprisingly, wanting the trial to be over. The whole thing irritated him: the stupidity of the crime, the arrogance and fatuousness of Freeland, the enforced isolation, the goddamned cast; he even regretted getting to know Russell in these after-hours meetings.

  Here he was, mopping, as Karp emerged. Karp nodded curtly and began to get dressed.

  “You got any smokes?”

  “Sorry, I forgot,” said Karp. He sensed Russell staring at him, but he did not acknowledge it, or make any effort to start a conversation.

  “Hey, man,” said Russell after some moments, “I heard some things.”

  “Uh-huh, like what?”

  “You know, stuff. Around the jail. Like you might wanna know about.” Russell had his pathetic sly expression on.

  “Uh-huh. So, you going to tell me?”

  “I could. Depends on what I get.”

  Karp pulled his sweats on. Water had dripped down inside his cast and was itching. He said, “I got nothing to give you, Hosie.”

  “You sure about that? This, what I got, it’s a big case.”

  Karp got his crutches under his arms and stood. He looked Russell in the eye. “Well, here’s the thing, Hosie. First of all, like I said a while back, there’s no way I’m going to discuss your case in any way whatever without your attorney present. If you have something you want to deal for, he’s the guy to see.

  “Second, right now I’d say that if you gave me the guy who did JFK, you’d still be looking at twenty-five to life. The time to deal is past. You decided to go for the trial, and you got the trial. They find you not guilty, you walk; you’re guilty, it’s the max. That’s how it works.

  “And there’s no point you looking at me like that. It’s nothing personal. You can’t be on the street. You’re a career criminal, you’ve already spent most of your life in the slam, and now you’re going to spend the rest of it inside. That’s your part in the play. It’s my part to put you away, and it’s Freeland’s part to try to stop me. It’s a puppet show. Or like a mechanical bank—you put the penny in the slot and the little clown spins around.”

  “It’s like that, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” said Karp after a sigh. “Sometimes I think it is.”

  “Whatever you do to me ain’t gonna bring her back.”

  “There’s that. You know, when I was in law school, I heard a guy lecture on the philosophy behind punishment. What he called ‘the supposed justification.’ He did a pretty good job of proving that there wasn’t any—rehabilitation is a joke, deterrence is unethical, revenge is immoral.”

  “Didn’t convince you much.”

  Karp smiled. “No, it didn’t. Or to tell the truth, I saw the logic of what he was saying, but it didn’t feel right to me. You hurt someone, you got to suffer. There has to be justice or the world doesn’t make sense. I’m talking gut level, not all the legal horseshit.

  “So let me give you some advice. You heard something in the cells. Maybe somebody admitted doing something that somebody else is going down for. Or somebody has some information about a crime that the cops don’t know about. You figure you can use it to get a better deal, because you’re a hustler. You’re looking out for number one. That’s what you’ve always done, your whole li
fe. Well, look around. Here you are. Here you’re gonna stay. That’s what hustling got for you.

  “What I’m saying is, think about it; maybe you should start doing the opposite. Do something for somebody else, a stranger maybe. You can’t fuck up your life any worse than it’s already been, and who knows? It could change your luck.”

  He stumped out leaving Hosie Russell looking at him blankly, as if he had been speaking Armenian.

  Marlene, baby on hip, pounded on the iron door of Stuart Franciosa’s loft, which, after a considerable wait, was opened by the proprietor, looking harassed. He wore a heavy reflective apron over his usual black sweatshirt and black canvas pants, and he had a pair of dark goggles pushed up on his forehead.

  “Sorry, I’m in the midst,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I’m going shopping,” said Marlene. “You want me to pick anything up?”

  “How considerate! How about the severed head of the odious Lepkowitz?”

  “Oh, God, don’t remind me. The deadline’s getting close, isn’t it?”

  “Less than a month. How’re you doing on it?”

  “Doomed. I’m starting to get my head adjusted to the possibility that the fucker could actually kick me out.”

  “Oh, you’ll think of something. But, really, shopping? Thanks, but we want for nothing. We eat like birds, as you know. Say, I heard about what happened Saturday. You really have to stop being attacked by criminals, Marlene. It’s bringing the neighborhood down.”

  “I’ll think about it. What’re you doing in there, by the way?”

  “Casting. Want to see? It’s quite dramatique. ”

  The big workroom was hot and smelled of burning.

  “It’s just a little bronze, a test really,” said Stuart. “I just got this neat little electric furnace. It was starting to be a pain in the ass to go up to the foundry for every little thing. Don’t look directly in the door.”

  Stuart used a set of tongs to open the door of the squat cylinder. Harsh yellow light and a blast of heat shot out. He reached in with the tongs and drew out a glowing crucible and poured a stream of liquid bronze into a small mold, throwing a shower of sparks and a cloud of smoke.