“Oh-ho! You think these guys maybe discussed the situation with our friends? Maybe gave them a little free legal advice, the scumbags?”
“It’s a possibility. Well, I’ll leave you to your musings. See you in court.”
V.T. rose to go. As he went out the door, something popped into Karp’s mind. “V.T., wait a minute. Cousins made me think of your father. He knows the New York corporate law scene pretty well, doesn’t he?”
“You could say that. Why?”
“Could you ask him about a firm called McNamara, Shannon, Shannon and Devlin?”
“What about them?”
“Just what their business is, who they represent. Marlene told me they just issued a big check for the legal defense of the Croats. It looks like they’re hiring Arthur Bingham Roberts. I’d like to know who’s that interested in these assholes walking away from this.”
V.T. whistled softly through his teeth. “Offhand, I’d say it was a gift from God.”
“What do you mean.”
“Well, I needn’t trouble Father on this one. The fact of the matter is that McNamara, et al. get about ninety-five percent of their business from the Archdiocese of New York. I’d bet that the check was Powerhouse money. What’s wrong? You look like you just ate a rat.”
“Oh, nothing. Some things are starting to come clear. Thanks, V.T., see you later.”
After Newbury had left, Karp took out his diagram.
He crossed out the question marks over “Spicer,” “Denton,” and “Hanlon,” replacing them with heavy check marks, and drew a heavy circle around all the policemen. A thick jagged line came down from this circle to strike the stick figure. Poor “Karp”! Then he made a heavy line from the police to “FBI” and to “BLOOM.”
Then he made another circle floating in the upper right of the page and labeled it “CIA,” and connected it with a thin line to “CROATS.” Question mark on that; involvement, but who knew what it was? Almost done. In the upper left he drew a heavy-sided box. An arrow came down from it and touched the dollar sign near “A.B. Roberts.” Another arrow flew over to the “COPS” circle. He pressed hard on this arrow, thickening it and doodling little circles and arabesques around it. Then he doodled a steeple on the heavy-sided box, and on top of it, a cross. He studied the diagram for a long minute, then folded it up carefully and placed it in his trouser pocket. “Holy shit,” he said out loud. “Holy shit.”
10
KARP WALKED HOME through the deserted streets of downtown, the fateful diagram folded into a small square and stuffed in his wallet. The night was cold and damp, and he was wearing only a thin raincoat over his rumpled suit. The chill he felt in his vitals did not, however, have an entirely meteorological origin. He felt utterly alone, abandoned, a lost child on unforgiving streets. This feeling had quite overcome his natural skepticism about conspiracy. His thoughts raced in idiotic confusion, looking for some strong refuge, something undeniably real. The law? Obviously, a sham. Justice? A silly joke. Love? Give me a break! Religion? Vain mumblings of tribes.
From forgotten depths, bred in a hundred schoolyard brawls, his paranoia of Catholics blossomed like a noxious weed. He had been raised in one of the borderland areas that dot the five boroughs, this one deep in Brooklyn, where Kings Highway and Flatbush Avenue join. Go northwest from this junction and you are in Midwood, among the Jewish middle class. Karp had lived on this side of the border, but barely. Go south and you are in Flatlands—solid Irish and Italian. East is East Flatbush, now heavily black, but when Karp was growing up a mixed province of white ethnics: Italians, Poles, Germans, Hungarians.
Although native New Yorkers know that New York is not the melting pot of legend, tolerance generally prevails among the adults populating these zones. But the male youth of an age to wander the streets and play in the concrete schoolyards were subject to outbursts of tribal barbarism that would not have been misplaced in Beirut. Karp had been a husky, strong kid and had two big brothers, but he spent a lot of time in the streets and he took his lumps. He learned early that you get your lumps largely from persons who do not share your eth. In Karp’s case, in the Brooklyn of the late forties, these were almost always flat-faced, snub-nosed, pale, light-haired, blue-eyed kids: Irish, Poles, Catholics.
Of course, this had been a long time ago. Karp’s family had become more prosperous and moved out of the city to a homogeneous suburb just before he had gone west to college. Religion and ancestry were not big issues at Berkeley in the mid sixties. Karp’s Jewish consciousness and the associated paranoia approached absolute zero. Back in New York, working for the DA’s office, he was vaguely conscious of something called the Archdiocese of New York as a force to be reckoned with, like the police and the mayor’s office, and the Chase Manhattan Bank, but he had never given it any particular thought. In fact, until he had caught that case on the boy burglar—Brannigan? Brannon?—he had never been asked to deal directly with the Church. Uh-oh. Why not? Because he was Jewish? Because he didn’t know the secret signs? Then why now? Why did they insist he deal with it now? Part of the plot? Was there a connection between the Croats and Brannon? Ridiculous. But just as ridiculous was the confirmed fact that the NYPD was conspiring to prevent him from prosecuting a case against five people who had killed a cop. And that the Church was footing the bill for the killers.
Before he dived into a troubled sleep that night, a vivid image from childhood burst into his mind. He was walking home along a Brooklyn commercial street holding his grandmother’s hand. He did not particularly like his grandmother; in fact, she terrified him. She was a broad, powerful woman from the backwoods of Galicia, a creature out of the sixteenth century, subject to fits of rage and unpredictable violence.
On this occasion she had been angry about something, and Karp was being pulled quickly down an unfamiliar street. At a corner was a larger, dark brick building with turrets and an iron-bound oak door. A church or a parochial school. In a tiny iron-railed enclosure before the building stood a life-size white statue of a gently smiling woman with her hands outstretched, palms upward. Karp remembered pulling toward the statue to get a better look, but his grandmother had hauled him roughly away and mumbled some dreadful curse in a mixture of Yiddish and Polish. Then she spat on the ground.
Karp dragged himself out of bed the next morning, feeling headachey and bilious. He threw himself on his rowing machine and exercised violently for half an hour, until his muscles screamed and his vision was red with pain. Then he took a hot shower. Physical pain was the best medicine he had found for the mental agonies of the night.
This time it didn’t quite work. The headache was gone and his belly was ready for another influx of dreck, but the queasiness remained in his spirit. Something was cooking, that was for sure, and in some way he was in the pot. On the other hand, he thought, how could you go to a friend and tell him that the Catholic Church, the NYPD, the FBI, and the district attorney were conspiring against you? What could he say? What about the KGB, Butch? They miss the boat? No, his friends would be very kind, and after a while, so would the doctors at the sanitarium. No, for a while at least, he would have to play it uncomfortably solo.
And since at work Karp was normally sociable and frank to a fault, the new Karp attracted attention. He began to lock his desk. He started using public telephones for certain outgoing calls. He stopped talking about the Doyle case. He began to insert long pauses and hard stares before his responses in conversations, as if mentally reviewing the dossier of the person speaking. “Want to go for coffee, Butch?” Pause, beat, beat, beat. “Yeah, OK.”
Two days after this new Karp had emerged, Ray Guma buttonholed V.T. Newbury outside a fourteenth-floor courtroom. “Hey, wait up a minute, I got to talk to you. Look, V.T., you notice anything strange about Butch recently, last couple days?”
“Umm, well, a little diffident, perhaps. Secretive?”
“Secretive? He’s acting like he’s in a Gestapo movie, for crying out loud. Listen to what happened to
day. I got this case, a homicide, a domestic, a grounder, but it’s got a little twist to it. Lady in the Village turns up dead, Bleecker Street. So, needless to say, the cops look for the old man. He ain’t at work, skipped the last two days. The cops hit the streets, ask around. This is Comer and Defalco from Manhattan South, by the way. So what happens? A priest from St. Joseph’s shows up at the precinct with a story. It turns out the victim, Mrs. Bendiccio, has been playing around. She goes to the priest to spill her guts—not confession, just unburdening, she’s not sure she wants to dump the boyfriend, maybe she wants to know how much time she’s got to do in the barbecue in the next life, whatever.
“Anyway, she tells the priest the boyfriend’s got a hot temper, she’s scared that if she dumps him and goes back to Augie, he’ll go batshit. When the priest hears she’s been whacked, naturally he comes in and lays the story on Defalco and Comer. Even got a name for the boyfriend, Ted Mores.”
V.T. glanced at the hall clock. “Goom, what does this have to do with Butch?”
“Wait, I’m getting to it. OK, it’s no trick finding either man. Hubby stumbles home, surprised as hell to find somebody choked his old lady while he was off on a binge. Ted goes, ‘What girlfriend?’ clams up, wants a lawyer. An insurance guy, married, lives in Peter Cooper.
“Naturally, I want to tell Karp about this, get his sense of how to play the case. OK, I go to his office. I knock. He unlocks the door. He’s locking himself in the office now, in case you don’t know. I go in, he rushes back to the desk and clears some papers off, in a hurry, like he doesn’t want me to see them. So I tell him the facts of the case. When I get to the part about the main informant being a priest, kaboom! He goes pale, jumps up, starts pacing back and forth. He starts asking all these crazy questions. Is Ted Catholic? Is Comer the cop Catholic? I ask him why he wants to know, he clams up. ‘Oh, just curious, you know.’ In a pig’s eye I know. And there’s other stuff …”
Guma’s voice faded. He scowled and chewed on his lower lip.
“Sounds grim,” V.T. agreed. “What do you think? You think he’s flipping out from the strain?”
“Flipping out? You mean going crazy? Like he wasn’t crazy already? I’d have to think about that. Guy who lives in an apartment with no furniture, works eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, at a job where his boss is looking to put the blocks to him any way he can, which also pays him around three tenths of what he’s worth—I don’t know what word you might use to describe such a person, but ‘crazy’ might not be entirely out of line.”
“Not ‘dedicated’? ‘Devoted to justice in all its multifarious forms,’ perhaps?”
Guma smiled. “Same thing in this shithole. But really, you know and I know that Karp is the best trial lawyer we still got around here, and he’s been carrying the joint on major crimes since Garrahy kicked off. In the office the guy is ice. You’ve heard him on cross-exam. Other DAs, they can’t resist the little dig at a hostile witness. Pisses off the judge, confuses the jury. And Butch? He treats these bastards like gold, gets the story, in, out, bingo. The jury thinks he’s God, they wouldn’t treat this obvious asshole that good. And so on.
“Now this. And it’s connected to this goddamn hijack case, I know it is. But what I can’t figure is, how come Karp is suddenly so interested in religious persuasion when as far as I know—and I’ve known the guy seven, eight years—he never made a peep about it before. The reason I ask is that if Karp is all of a sudden going to turn into a pain in the ass—and he is the only boss around here that isn’t—then maybe I got to seek some serious career counseling. I’m too old to put up with assholes.”
“I see your point. Have you talked with any of the others? Roland? Or Marlene?”
“Roland? Who knows what Roland is thinking? Guy’s a fucking animal. Roland thinks Karp’s losing it, who knows what he’ll do? You heard the expression, ‘If you have a Hungarian for a friend, you don’t need any enemies’? That’s Roland. They made it about him.”
“And Marlene?”
“Ciampi? She’s not exactly your connoisseur of sanity at the present time. You know she heads for the can on a daily basis for a good honk? Or so my informants inform me.”
“Well, she’s had her troubles.”
“So what? I got my troubles too. Am I carrying forty cases? Fuck, yeah. Is my ex taking me to court for the orthodontist bills for two kids: four, five big ones? Fuck, yeah. I’d a known that, I would’ve kicked their teeth out before the divorce. You see anything wrong with my teeth, V.T.? They work. They eat food. Women and children don’t run screaming when they see me on the street. Well, theirs are just like mine, couple of gaps is all. Five grand, which I haven’t got, she’s taking me to court. So you see me sitting in the crapper bawling? No fucking way.”
“And the bottom line of this is … ?”
“Talk to him, V.T. He respects you. Talk to Marlene. Find out what’s going on. He’s got a hard-on for the pope? Fine, we’ll fix it, anything. Butch goes off the rails, man, we might as well turn this place over to the mutts.”
Bill Denton finally caught up with Karp late in the week, after four rounds of telephone tag, which Karp had engineered by calling back when he was sure Denton would be away from his desk. A standard bureaucratic trick, but not foolproof if the person you are trying to avoid has your private number and doesn’t mind using it.
“Karp, where’ve you been? I been trying to get you for days.”
“Oh, busy. You know.”
“That’s the problem, I don’t know. What’s happening on Doyle?”
“We’ve started with the grand jury, just a couple of witnesses. I’m expecting to finish up the presentation tomorrow. There shouldn’t be a problem getting an indictment, and we can arraign on the indictments early next week. One lawyer is representing the bunch of them, so there’s only one set of motions to take up time. Assuming everything goes as expected.”
“Any reason it shouldn’t?”
“Not aside from the stuff you know about already. The FBI acting up. People intimidating witnesses. Riots. Cops trying to mess with the evidence. Nothing we can’t handle. Expect the unexpected, as you always say.”
“Yeah. I’ve been looking into that. I’ve got to admit, it could be you were right. Something funny is going on, and it’s connected to this case.”
“Oh? Any hot leads?”
“Some stuff,” Denton said vaguely, “it hasn’t jelled yet. By the way, you’re still holding the physical evidence, aren’t you?”
“Some of it. We have the stuff from the homicide scene. Your guys are still holding whatever they pulled out of the defendants’ apartments and business premises. Which I’d like to see, by the way. I’ve asked Spicer about it, more than once.”
Denton grunted indifferently. “You think it’s safe? Where you’ve got it, I mean?”
“Yeah, it’s safe, Bill. And where it is, that’s where it’s going to stay. And since we’re talking about the evidence in the case, maybe you could lean on old Fred to come across with what he’s got. It might be helpful to know what the evidence is before the trial.”
“You got it, Butch,” Denton said. He paused. Then he said, “Is there something wrong, Butch? You sound funny all of a sudden.”
“No, nothing. Just working hard.”
“Oh. Well, take it easy, then. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”
“No, we wouldn’t, would we, you fucking hypocrite dirt bag!” Karp said to the dead phone after Denton had broken the connection. This is great, he thought, talking to myself. Me and Dirty Warren. I wonder how much he clears from the magazines? Maybe it’s not too late to think about a second career.
He dialed Marlene’s office number. He let it ring ten times and then put it down. He looked at his watch: six-ten. He had a date with Marlene that evening, during which, he had just about decided, he was going to tell her the whole tangled story and show her his diagram. If she bought it, he would at least have an ally and be don
e with dissembling to the woman he loved, and if she didn’t, she could take him over to Bellevue and have him committed. Or laugh. Maybe a good yuck would blow the paranoia away. But it couldn’t come from inside him. He was void of yucks.
His phone rang, and when he picked it up it was Marlene. “Hi, I’m home. What a day! I’m totally finished.” Her voice sounded thin and distant, like a tape played on a cheap Walkman ripoff.
“You OK?”
“Not really. This Moore thing is getting me down.”
“Did you happen to look into the source of that defense check in Karavitch? At those lawyers, Shannon Shannon and so on?”
“Oh, Christ, I knew I forgot something. Damn. Look, I’ll get on it tomorrow.”
“No, that’s OK, I’ll get one of the cops on it. It’s their job.”
“OK, great, thanks. I’m sorry, but this case is just draining the crap out of me. For some reason I can’t cope with it.”
“What’s the problem? I thought it was open and shut. Depraved indifference homicide, Form Two. They claim somebody else sneaked in late at night, put the kid in the oven?”
“It’s not a technical problem, Butch. It’s not a legal problem, putting asses in jail. It’s an emotional problem. It’s my problem; I can’t get it out of my head. The scene. The corpus of the crime, as we say. She’s trying to get mellow with Cecil in the bedroom, but little Taneel is crying. Four, the kid is. She won’t stop. She whips the kid with a belt. Still no good: damn kid won’t stop. She can’t stand the noise. She drags the kid to the kitchen and puts the girl in the oven, and she wedges the door closed with a chair. She turns on the flame. How come? How come she turned on the flame? I asked her that, ‘Doreen, how come?’ Shrug. Dunno. Story of her life. Goes back to the bedroom, suck on some 20-20, do a little skag, Cecil puts it to her, she so fine. All the time the little girl is shrieking, roasting alive. She can’t hear the screams too well, but the stench—”
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