Corruption of Blood
( Karp and Ciampi - 7 )
Robert K. Tanenbaum
Robert K. Tanenbaum
Corruption of Blood
ONE
Nearly all Americans above a certain age can recall where they were the moment they learned of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A much smaller number can recall where they were when they discovered who really did it.
One of these few was sitting in a dripping raincoat in a reading room on the fifth floor of the Lauinger Memorial Library at Georgetown University, in Washington D.C., on a rainy April day in the year 1977. On the wooden table before him was the sort of hinged cardboard box, the size and shape of a large book, that attorneys use to keep together all the material connected with some legal combat: a literal "case." Within it were several dozen typed pages, including a letter from a United States senator, several memoranda from the files of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a thick packet of handwritten notes on lined yellow paper, two bankbooks, a small ledger, some photographs and clippings, a tape cassette, and a reel of 8-mm home movie film. There was also a sealed olive jar full of alcohol in which floated a chunk of human flesh.
The man shivered and stood to remove his sopping raincoat. A young woman, four seats down at the long table, glanced up at him from her thesis research (American Policy in Honduras, 1922-39) and then, a moment later, gave him a longer look, for the reading she was doing was tedious and he was not an ordinary-looking man.
He was very tall, for one thing, a bit over six-feet-five. His body, in its damp and rumpled dark suit, was broad-shouldered and rangy. He walked over to a display case and seemed to stare unseeing at a selection of colonial maps, and she could see that he walked with a slight limp.
His face, profiled, was moderately beaked and high cheekboned, the eyes having a slight oriental cast, and the sallow skin of his face and the lank dark hair, soaked and plastered tight against his skull, contributed to the general impression of the East-some Tatar or gypsy blood perhaps, she thought. You got to see all kinds in the Georgetown library.
She thought idly about who he might be. Not a bureaucrat. A bureaucrat would not have been caught in the rain. All bureaucrats in Washington carried those little spring-loaded folding umbrellas. Not military either. The hair was too long, and he was not old enough to have been retained on active duty with that limp; mid-thirties, she reckoned. Too obvious for a spy, with that size. A diplomat, perhaps, maybe from the Other Side. That was romantic enough. But an Eastern diplomat would have been dry; they went everywhere in cars with dark tinted windows. A professor, then? A professor might have forgotten his umbrella…
Suddenly, he turned and stared directly into her face. She immediately dropped her eyes to her monograph and tried to get back into the reading. When she looked again, sideways, surreptitiously, he was still staring at her, unsmiling. He had peculiar eyes, long, slightly slanted, and very pale hazel, almost yellow. She felt them etching away at the side of her head. After a few uncomfortable minutes, she gathered her papers together and left. No, not a professor at all, she concluded.
She was correct. The man was a lawyer, surely the most common profession in Washington, but one that had not occurred to the young woman in her idle guessing, because he was not a Washington lawyer. He was a homicide prosecutor named Roger Karp, and he had come from the New York District Attorney's Office some seven months ago to serve as counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, specifically to run the investigation of the murder of John F. Kennedy. This investigation was complete, as far as Karp was concerned. A few minutes ago he had quit. He certainly would have been fired if anyone knew what he was doing with the stuff in the box. Legally, it belonged to the United States government, and he was breaking the law by holding on to it.
Karp sat back in his chair and watched the back of the retreating graduate student. He rubbed his face vigorously, as if to massage from it the malign expression that had spooked the woman, vaguely regretting having used on a perfectly harmless citizen the tactical-nuclear stare that had wrung confessions out of desperadoes in the Tombs, back in the city.
He had been paranoid, of course, but paranoia had become his natural state. He could not remember a time when he had not been beset by people trying to screw him personally or at least trying to stop him from doing his job. It had been bad enough at the DA, and magnitudes worse since his arrival in the capital.
He opened the box and spread the contents across the table, resisting an impulse to look furtively over his shoulder. He had taken the subway (as he still called it, although everyone else used the pretentious "metro") from the Federal Center stop near his office to M Street, and then had walked to Georgetown. Karp was a devotee of public transportation and he had never acknowledged that there were wide swaths of D.C. that had no subway stops at all. The storm had broken while he was riding on the shiny, toylike train, and he had been soaked during the absurdly long walk to the university.
He picked up the stack of yellow legal pads held together by rubber bands-his notes of the last seven months-and began a familiar activity: paging through the scribbled notes and making private marks here and there, recasting the information onto fresh sheets of paper, turning a mass of associated evidence into a story that he could tell to a jury. That he would never tell this particular story to an actual jury was at this point irrelevant. He wanted to make the complex material accessible and convincing to… whomever. God, maybe. It was both an irrational and a sacred act, like washing a corpse.
He worked quickly, because the material was familiar and he had kept good notes. He marked the various documents and other evidence with large circled letters, which he then keyed to the appropriate sections of his expository text. He also wrote a brief provenance for each item. It wasn't a legally acceptable chain of evidence, but it would have to do.
As he concentrated, his tongue crept out between his lips, a boyish trait. Any number of these survived in him, a remarkable fact given the atmosphere of grotesque cynicism in which he plied his trade. His friends called him Butch, a ridiculous name for a huge, dignified, grown man, but one that, oddly enough, suited him. In any case, he refused to answer to any other, as he had since the age of four.
Karp wrote very quickly, boyishly, of course, in a large round hand, the same school penmanship he had learned in the New York City public schools, in an era when they still functioned as educational institutions. He still got his hair cut in a barbershop run by an elderly Italian in a white smock; his inability to find one of these in the razor-cut, blowdry capital of the world was evidenced by the current length of his hair, which crept below his collar for the first time in his life. Karp had skipped the sixties.
He retained most of the Boy Scout virtues. He was courteous, loyal, brave, clean, and thrifty, passing on reverent. Many of the types, on both sides of the law, with whom he dealt in the New York criminal courts, took this as evidence that he was also a sucker, a mistake few made more than once.
Karp had, in fact, the best homicide prosecution record in the recent history of the New York DA's Office. He had tried over a hundred cases, losing not one. He was arguably the best person in the country to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy, assuming that anyone in charge really wanted to find out what happened in Dallas. As it turned out, they did not.
Putting down his pen, he riffled through a stack of legal bond, looking for a reference. A square yellow slip of paper dropped out onto the table. Karp picked it up and studied it. It was a telephone message slip dated seven months and three days earlier. The overture to this farce.
Karp shuffled through his message slips after l
unch, arranging them in order of importance. Most of them were bureaucracy at work, it being a fine habit of bureaucrats to call during lunch hour, passing the buck, but not having to actually come to any closure on the issue at hand. Karp, as the chief of the homicide bureau, got a lot of these calls.
In turn, he would spend the odd lunch hour in his own office, eating a greasy sandwich and returning the calls to vacant offices, leaving his own messages. One slip popped out at him because it had an area code in front of the number. A Bert Crane called While You Were Out. Karp pulled the phone book out of a bottom drawer and found that the code was for Philadelphia.
Oh, that Bert Crane. In the narrow world of prosecuting attorneys, Crane was something of a star-or had been. Karp seemed to recall that he had resigned as district attorney in Philadelphia some years back and was now a prominent member of the criminal bar. His reputation was based largely on a case against the assassins of an insurgent union leader, in which he had convicted not only the killers but the racketeering Teamster boss who had hired them.
He's going to offer me a job, thought Karp. This happened at least once a month, mostly from white-shoe law firms in the city who wanted a name prosecutor to handle the criminal stuff that occasionally came their way, as when the drunken heir runs the Ferrari over the old lady. Occasionally, Karp would get a serious offer from a big-time criminal lawyer, the kind who write books about their own genius. Like Lucifer with Christ, they stood him on a mountaintop and showed him the treasures of the earth. Karp had always turned them down, for reasons he could not quite articulate.
It was, after all, past time for him to leave the DA's. He had been there twelve and a half years, ever since law school; it had been his only real job. It was more or less expected that after a period of seasoning in the DA, lawyers with ambition would go private, or switch over to the federal side, or, after a little longer, become judges. He looked around his office. It was a small spare room with a frosted-glass-windowed door that gave on the bureau's outer office, where the clerks and secretaries sat. It contained a battered wooden desk, a leather chair behind the desk and two in front for visitors, and behind these a long, scratched oak table with a miscellany of chairs around it, for conferences.
These furnishings were part of the original equipment of the criminal courts building, which had been constructed in 1930. The leather of the chairs was cracked, and gushed white stuffing. To the right of the desk were two large windows looking out on a short street and the New York State office building across it. If you stood at the window and leaned out you could see the trees of a tiny park, beyond which was Chinatown. It was the office's best, or rather its only good, feature.
Karp was no sort of status hound, but he understood that the tattiness of his personal surroundings and the even worse conditions with which his staff had to contend were petty symbols of the contempt for Karp and all his works that steamed perpetually in the heart of Karp's boss, the district attorney, Sanford Bloom.
Bloom had not the guts to fire Karp outright, but neither Karp nor anyone who worked for him would ever get a new office or new furniture. The paint would rot off their walls. Their promotions would be delayed and their personnel records screwed up.
Everyone in the DA's office knew this. As a result, only the intrepid came to work for Karp in the homicide bureau, and what should have been the cream of the DA's prosecutorial staff grew milky with the years.
People didn't stay long, and those who did were mostly the hacks, or those too uncouth for private firms. Fanatics like Karp, who lived only to try cases and put asses in jail, were fewer and fewer as the years passed.
Karp didn't want to be a judge. He wanted to be twenty-four and working, as he had then, for the finest prosecutorial office in the known universe. He sighed and looked at the little yellow slip, and dialed the long-distance number.
He gave his name to the woman who answered and she put him through to Crane instantly. Crane's voice was deep and confident, and "cultured" in the style of classical music announcers on FM radio.
Crane got quickly to the point. "Joe Lerner gave me your name. As you probably know, I've been appointed chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations."
Karp didn't know. He had almost no interest in political news and restricted his newspaper reading to the crime reports and the sports pages. Nor did he watch much television. But he had a vague recollection that Congress was reopening the investigations into the murders of both Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And he knew who Joe Lerner was.
"How is Joe?" Karp asked.
"Fine. He's working for me now."
"No kidding? Doing what?"
"I'll have two assistant chief counsels. Joe is going to be running the Martin Luther King side of it. He recommended you highly."
"That's a surprise," said Karp, genuinely surprised.
"Oh?"
"Yeah, Joe and I had a little bit of a falling-out just before he split from the office. He was my rabbi when I was breaking in and I guess he assumed I'd keep following his lead."
"This was about some case?"
"No, it was a political thing. Joe thinks I lack political judgment."
A pause. "Well, he thinks you're a hell of a prosecutor, anyway. The best is what he said, actually."
"Next to you, of course. And him."
Crane had a booming laugh. "Of course! Look, maybe the best thing would be if you could run down here to Philadelphia and we could discuss it face-to-face. I'd like to meet you and I'm sure Joe would like to see you again. I know you've got a tight schedule, but could you make it, say, Thursday, day after tomorrow? We could have lunch and talk."
The man's diffidence was starting to annoy Karp. Just once, he wished one of these guys would call him up and say, "Hundred and ninety grand a year for defending scumbags, plus you kiss my ass. Yes or no?"
"And what would we be talking about, Mr. Crane?" Karp asked.
"Please-it's Bert. Well, of course, about you joining our team. Joe suggested that you might be interested in new pastures. Something with more scope for your abilities."
"You mean as Joe's assistant?"
Crane chuckled. "No, no, of course not. I want you for the Kennedy half. In charge of it."
"Oh," said Karp, and then couldn't think of a bright rejoinder.
"You're interested?"
"That's a good word," Karp admitted.
"Fine. I'll expect you in my office Thursday, eleven-thirty." Crane passed on some details about how to get to his office and then closed the conversation.
Karp made the rest of his calls and then futzed around for the remainder of the afternoon, irritated that he was unable to maintain his usual focus. His job consisted largely of supervising the work of thirty other prosecutors, which meant that he had to be passably familiar with several hundred homicide cases at once.
There was a man talking to him who suddenly stopped. Karp realized with a start that the man was waiting for a reply. He was a junior prosecutor and he had just asked Karp for some direction on a case.
Karp felt an embarrassed sweat blossom on his face.
"Sorry, I was somewhere else. Hit me with that again."
The young man said, "This is Wismer. Defendant beat his estranged wife to death with a blunt instrument. The case… the charge is murder two…"
The kid was nervous. Karp recalled that this was probably his first murder case solo, and could be his first homicide trial. It did not occur to Karp that the kid was nervous because he was presenting an issue to a demigod. Awe made Karp uncomfortable, and so he simply refused to recognize that it existed.
Collins, his name was, Karp recalled. A neat, strong-looking black kid from upstate somewhere, and an athlete, like nearly all the people Karp hired. He had a pencil mustache he kept fiddling with. From time to time he glanced at his watch.
Karp reached into his mental files. "Yeah, Wismer, guy's got a sheet as a petty thief and dealer, seen leaving the wife's apartment, picked out
of a lineup. What's the problem?"
"Somebody called the cops, wouldn't give the name. A woman. Said there was a boyfriend, and he did the crime. The boyfriend's a man named Warren Hobart. Also not a taxpayer: did time on a 120.10 a couple of years ago plus the usual drug shit."
"Don't tell me-he looks just like Wismer."
Collins smiled. "Well, they're both medium-sized, skinny, medium-dark black guys. Surprise."
"So, put them in a lineup and see which one the witness likes best."
"Um, that's the problem. The cops think it's bullshit. They got the guy, Wismer. Case is cleared."
Karp's brow clouded at this, and he asked, "What's the rest of Wismer? We have any physical evidence?"
"We have a print on the murder weapon."
"Which was?"
"A juice machine."
"A what?"
"Yeah, right. It was one of those old-fashioned kind of orange-juice squeezers-all steel, weighed a ton. Must've just grabbed it there in the kitchen and whapped her a couple upside the head. Crushed in her temple bone."
"Okay, on the cops-who caught the case again?"
"Angeletti, Zone Six Homicide."
"Yeah, Vince Angeletti. Look, here's the thing: the cops got a lot to do, especially uptown there, and the last thing they want to do is to piss on their own cleared cases. But with the situation as it is right now you couldn't convict Wismer of criminal mischief, much less murder two. You got to get them to check out this character Hobart. Don't ask them, tell them. If you get any more shit from Angeletti, let me know and I'll fuck with his head. His lieutenant is a good buddy of mine. You got to remind these guys once in a while who's in charge of a criminal prosecution. When you got Hobart, do the lineup again, and make sure whoever's on D is there to see it. If your witness waffles, I think we're fucked. Or we could get lucky and find a bunch of bloody clothes in Hobart's closet. He's got that assault conviction."
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