Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Karp’s stomach tightened involuntarily. A thousand hours of work and six months were about to be distilled into a single word. He looked over at Dodd, who was licking his lips nervously. Perhaps he was now thinking that he should have taken the plea. If he was actually convicted, he had nothing to go on, no other angle to play. He would have to pay for his crime, not something that had previously been an issue to him.

  The foreman cleared his throat and said, “Guilty.” The courtroom murmured in that special way that courtrooms do when a verdict is announced and which, if you are a lawyer on the right side of a verdict, is sweeter than the impassioned cheering of thousands. The jury was polled. They all said “guilty” too. The judge set a date for sentencing, thanked the jury, uttered a short homily to the effect that crime did not pay, and banged his gavel.

  Men came to take Ramon Dodd away. If he survived his time in prison, when he next breathed free air he would be considerably older than Karp was now.

  Karp did not watch Ramon Dodd’s translation from person into statistic. He gathered up his notes and transcripts into the manila folders where they belonged and shoved them into the hinged cardboard box—the literal “case”—in which he kept all his personal file records for each trial.

  Then he rose from the table. Karp was a very tall, well-built man, in height a little over six feet five inches, and rangy, with broad shoulders, long arms and extremely large, bony hands. The features of his face were large too. The nose was broad and long, and had been broken and reset with a bump in it. The mouth was wide with a hint of sensuality. Under a heavy, bony brow, above high cheekbones, sat the most remarkable feature of Karp’s face, his odd, slanted gray eyes. Narrow but at the same time extraordinarily wide, they had small yellow flecks in them: the eyes of a not entirely domesticated animal.

  Karp moved up the aisle of the courtroom with his characteristic lope, the loose-limbed stride of a natural athlete. Which he was.

  As he walked through the hallways of the Criminal Courts Building, he received in passing the accolades of other assistant district attorneys—respectful and nearly awestruck in the case of the younger ones, flippant from friends, envious or grudging from others.

  Karp had some good friends among the other A.D.A.s, but he was not generally a well-liked man. He combined impatience and an almost brutal frankness with very high standards of performance, never the foundation for settled popularity. And those who came to the New York D.A.’s office with strong ambitions quickly found out that being nice to Karp was not the way to the heart of District Attorney Bloom. Rather the opposite, in fact.

  Karp entered his office, on the sixth floor of the building. He was at this time the bureau chief of the Criminal Courts Bureau, which was responsible for misdemeanors and a mixed set of the less egregious felonies. Within this homely operation Karp, remarkably, ran what amounted to a homicide bureau.

  There had once been a genuine homicide bureau, founded by Bloom’s predecessor, the legendary D.A. Francis P. Garrahy, and staffed with the best prosecutors in the world, of whom Karp had briefly been one. But the bureau had been dissolved. Murder, the reasoning went, was just another felony, and there already was a Felony Bureau.

  But Karp understood that murder was different, and through a series of manipulations and pressures, playing subtly on Bloom’s enmity (for Bloom could not imagine that anyone could actually relish the political danger inherent in a major trial for murder, and lived for the day when Karp would ruin himself), he had arranged things so that he and a group of lawyers that he would supervise and train would be responsible for a substantial number of murder trials.

  Karp waved to Connie Trask, the bureau secretary, seated at her big desk in the center of the bureau’s outer office, and received a gold-rimmed toothy smile in return.

  “The good guys win again,” she said.

  “Every time, lady, every time,” replied Karp.

  “Don’t forget four o’clock for you-know-what,” said Trask.

  “You-know … ? Oh, yeah. Christ, I almost forgot!”

  “Your ass if you did, boss,” said Trask caustically, “and he wants to see you at a quarter to five.”

  The male pronoun used with the particular inflection Trask put on it, and in the present context, could have referred to only one person, the district attorney.

  “What does he want now?” asked Karp sulkily.

  “Probably wants to congratulate you and give you a raise,” said Trask, in a tone so slyly parodistic of a brown-nosing employee that Karp laughed aloud.

  Trask was a treasure, a handsome black grandmother in her late forties, a representative of the class of minor civil servants, often women, without whom grass would grow in the streets of the cities of the Western World. She forgot nothing and took shit from no one, and ran the administrative end of the bureau with such merciless skill that Karp had enough time to do trials—not a typical occupation for the average bureau chief.

  Still smiling, Karp walked through the outer office and into his private one. He hung up the coat of his blue pin-stripe, picked up the case file for Dodd and walked over to the row of five glass-front bookcases lined up along one wall. In these Karp kept a personal file for the murder cases he had handled. Each had four shelves and each shelf held just five case files. Karp slipped Dodd into the last remaining slot on the top shelf of the last bookcase. He would have to write a note to Connie to order him another one. There was plenty of room along the long wall under the window.

  He sat down behind his desk and considered the rows of cases. A simple multiplication popped into his mind, and he realized with a faint shock that he had just finished his hundredth murder case. And, although he did not think of it at the time, every one of them had been a conviction.

  A couple of hours later the outer office of the Criminal Courts Bureau was packed with people giggling and trying to be quiet under the continual shushing of Connie Trask. The ceiling of the office was decorated with balloons and crepe paper, and a long folding table had been covered with a cloth and drinks and snack food.

  Karp felt the first stirrings of the unease that the prospect of a party always brought on. He did not like either the taste of alcohol or its famous effects on the brain, which in his case were instantaneous and devastating. Nor did he enjoy the familiarity that drink engendered in others. But, although he would not go out of his way to attend one, in the course of his management of the bureau many parties had been placed in his way. There was some sort of celebration nearly every week: a birthday, an anniversary, a holiday.

  The secretaries and clerks seemed to think that the last few hours of the day, especially on, as now, a Friday, were not strictly the Empire State’s to dispose of. In this Karp meekly deferred to Connie Trask’s opinion that since much of what they did was bureaucratic make-work in any case, the diversion of work time for partying was more than made up by improvements in morale. And it was true that he had no cause to complain of the office staff on those occasions when heroic effort was required.

  Karp’s role in this particular party was special, as he was by way of being the author of the feast. The party was in honor of the (temporary) departure of Marlene Ciampi, an A.D.A. who had become Karp’s wife that past summer and was now spectacularly pregnant. Karp and Marlene had, of course, cohabited for many months before the wedding, an open secret from one end of Centre Street to the other, and the baby was both unplanned (the result of a statistically improbable failure of a birth-control apparatus) and most welcome.

  “Here she is—shussh!” said someone in a stage whisper. The door opened and in stepped Marlene Ciampi. “Surprise!” shouted the company, and Marlene, who was no more surprised than the Democratic party is when it elects a mayor of New York, mimed the most profound astonishment, as was expected.

  As always, Karp’s spirits lifted at the sight of her; he was besotted by love as he could never be by alcohol. In late pregnancy she radiated a glow that could be felt across the room, and her marvelou
s tawny skin seemed to shine. She wore a maxi-skirt of a shimmering gray material and a white maternity blouse under which she seemed to be concealing a basketball.

  Karp did not have much experience of pregnancy, having been the youngest of three brothers in a particularly isolated family, but he had been amazed at the matter-of-fact way in which his pregnant bride had dealt with this momentous change. It had something to do with her own position as the middle child in a family of six, and that family but one of a vast interrelated tribe of Italians, several of whom were bearing children at any one time.

  Marlene, after some initial and typical sickness—which she, confounded by her clever but treacherous IUD—had not even recognized as being what it was, had not flagged an instant at work. She was, in fact, more energetic than usual, since she had taken up the task of establishing a new, though tiny, bureau devoted to the prosecution of rape and other crimes of sexual violence, which had become her chief interest.

  He waved to her and she circulated through the crowd until she was smiling up at him.

  “Drunk again, I see,” said Marlene.

  Karp swished his plastic cup, which contained an inch of white wine and the rest 7-Up.

  “I can’t keep away from it since you corrupted me.”

  “Yes, and unlucky me, I’ve lost my taste for it, just when I need it to drown the boredom. Tab for another month. I’m getting hog fat anyway.”

  Marlene was, in fact, thinner than when Karp had first met her, four years ago. Then she had possessed the spectacular beauty of a magazine model: finely sculpted cheekbones, a firm little chin, a straight, long nose with a charming dip, and a broad, high forehead, all dressed in that miraculous skin. Her eyes were glossy black and heavily lashed.

  Karp had by now grown used to the odd way she held her head when in close conversation, cocked to the right so that a wing of thick, shiny black hair fell over the right side of her face. Her right eye was glass. She was also missing most of the two smallest fingers from her left hand, both losses the result of having been blown up by a bomb meant for Karp himself. The scarring had been repaired by surgery of colossal expense, worth every penny in Karp’s opinion, but she would never again possess the flawless beauty that she had once had. Instead there was something that Karp found even more breathtaking, a spare and almost feral loveliness, like a falcon’s.

  “Nice crowd,” said Karp.

  “Yes, I’m popular,” said Marlene. “It’s my deodorant. I heard Raney and Balducci are supposed to show up.”

  “You heard? It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “Hey, am I a trained investigator or what?” she replied, and then looked long at the throng. “I’m going to miss this place,” she said sadly. “Just when things were really rolling.”

  “You’ll be back. Luisa will watch your little empire.”

  Luisa Beckett was a tiny dynamo of a criminal prosecutor who had been recruited from the Brooklyn D.A. to second Marlene in the new sex-crimes unit. “Yeah, the Bureau-ette will be fine. What bothers me is the kid. Six weeks off and then I leave her with some Guatemalan. I know, I know, we’ve been over this, but it still sucks.”

  “What, you’re afraid when he’s twenty-one, he’ll say, ‘Mom, I don’t want to go to college. I’d like to pick coffee’?”

  “Very funny, but one-liners are not what she’s looking for,” said Marlene with a flash of irritation. “Sympathy and sincere concern is the ticket.”

  “Sorry,” said Karp automatically, and assumed the distracted blank look he wore when he was about to be lectured.

  Marlene caught it and changed the subject. “By the way, congrats on Dodd, my hero.”

  “Yeah, yet another dumb, skinny black kid in the can,” said Karp, bitterness touching his voice. “The grinder turns again.”

  “They’re not all like that.”

  “No, but most. Speaking of which, I figured out today that Dodd was my one-hundredth win. How do you like that?”

  “It’s only what I expect,” said Marlene complacently. “Why do you think I sucked the genes out of your young body? Shouldn’t we celebrate?”

  “Yeah, we could throw a party in the Tombs,” said Karp.

  “Good idea. What do you want for a present?”

  “I don’t know,” said Karp. “There should be a list of the appropriate gifts for each round number, like for wedding anniversaries.” Karp mimicked the plummy voice of an etiquette mistress: “Fifty is the vase of sewage sludge. Seventy-five, a selection of matched dog turds, and finally, one hundred, the most discriminating go for used Kleenex.”

  “Hey, Butch, you hear about Simmons?” said a voice behind them.

  Karp turned to regard a squat man of about forty-odd, wearing the opened vest of a three-piece suit and a smudgy white-on-white shirt with its tie yanked down four inches. His face had the wise, monkeyish ugliness of the revered Yogi Berra, whom he resembled in physiognomy, in ancestry, and, to an unfortunately much lesser extent, in baseball talent. He was an A.D.A. and his name was Raymond Guma.

  “Yeah, I caught it on the news, Goom,” replied Karp. “Hell of a thing.”

  “A guy I know in Queens says it was a drug hit,” said Guma. “His car was full of it.”

  “A drug hit? Simmons was pushing drugs? What, steroids?”

  “No, toot. A ton of prime flake, apparently.”

  Karp gave him a disbelieving look. “Goom, the guy makes—made—a million and a half bucks a year. He’d have to work full-time selling dope out of his car to clear that much. And who is he selling to? The fans? Kids in schoolyards? The guy was six-ten, for crissakes.”

  Guma shrugged. “Hey, it’s Queens anyway. What the fuck do they know? Meanwhile, the Hustlers are gonna be dead without him.”

  “There’s other guys on the team,” said Karp.

  “Yeah, but they can’t fly like Marion,” said Guma.

  “Who can’t fly?”

  This question was asked by Roland Hrcany, as he came up behind them, beer in hand. Hrcany was taller than Guma, but looked even less like a typical lawyer. His fine white blond hair was neck-length, and his body was almost grotesquely overdeveloped. His pale eyes and square-cut lumpy face was rescued from an appearance of brutality only by his engaging, if bad-toothed, smile. He was a ferociously aggressive prosecuting attorney and looked it.

  “Simmons could fly,” said Karp. “We were speculating on the Hustlers’ chances without him.”

  “Yeah, hell of a thing,” said Hrcany. “I figure they’ll move James into power forward.”

  Guma said, “James is no Simmons, one, besides which he’s hurt. If they were smart, they’d convert Blanding from a center to a power forward …”

  “Blanding can’t shoot for shit,” Hrcany retorted.

  “He doesn’t have to shoot, Roland,” said Guma impatiently. “What he has to do is catch the fuckin’ basketball and put it in the basket. He’s seven fuckin’ one, for chrissake!”

  “That ain’t the game, Guma,” began Hrcany, at which point Marlene said, “Uh, guys, excuse me, sports talk generates the deadly rays of boredom which are dangerous for the development of the foetal brain.”

  “Marlene, what the hell,” said Guma. “If it’s a chick it won’t matter, and if it’s a guy, Karp’ll teach it to shoot hoops and it still won’t matter.”

  Marlene gave him the finger in a friendly way and scooted, to the extent that she could still scoot, into the crowd.

  The three men talked about the Hustlers and about basketball in general, the kind of impassioned and knowledgeable talk that constitutes ninety percent of the off-job conversation of the majority of American men. Karp was conscious, as he always was, of the deference they paid to his opinions. This was not because he was their boss, but because he had been at one time one of the best high school basketball players in the country, two years high school All-American with his picture in Sports Illustrated, on three all-state teams, the state championship, full scholarship to Cal, where he had
burned up the PAC-10 in his sophomore year.

  Then, in the second game of his junior year he had been submarined under the boards. There was a massive pile-up and a 250-pound forward had dropped his full weight across Karp’s left knee as he was struggling to rise. Everything had torn loose, and Butch Karp had instantly become one of the might-have-beens that litter the back alleys of big-time basketball.

  Through a monumental act of will, Karp had refocused his competitive energy on the law. An indifferent student in high school, he had applied himself in college and later in law school and had won himself a place in what had then been the best prosecutorial staff in the nation.

  But his injury created a kind of pain that was not merely physical. (The literal injury now represented little more than a twinge in cold weather and the need to watch himself during exercise.) For most of his young life, the jock world had supported and encouraged him, sheltering him from loneliness.

  But as soon as it became clear that he would not be able to play during his college years, that world had dropped him without a thought. His coach at Cal, a surrogate father, who had invited Karp to his home, who had listened to his problems and shared his confidences, became a stranger. The friends, the girls, the hangers-on, vanished as well.

  Karp had been devastated. Lost and miserable, he had drifted into his hasty first marriage. Recovering, he had discovered in the heady competition of the courtroom some of what sports at the highest level had once supplied, and enough camaraderie from similar men. There were an unusual number of almost-great athletes in the New York D.A.’s office. Guma had been good enough for tryouts with the Yankees. Hrcany had won letters in both wrestling and football.

  Yet in his heart, Karp believed he was different, that had it not been for the accident he could have gone all the way, and become another Bill Bradley or Pete Maravich.

  “I know Nadleman,” Karp said. The conversation had come around to the Hustlers’ coach.

  “Yeah?” said Guma.