Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

Hrcany scooped up his papers and left. Karp walked over to his window and looked out. Six floors below he could see Leonard Street, a patch of blacktop that, at that point, was largely devoted to the parking of judges’ cars, while directly across Leonard was the New York State Office building, where he could actually observe an army of slow-moving clerks making it difficult for the citizens of New York to get license plates.

  The license plate was the odd thing about Roland’s case. Simple carelessness and stupidity or a sophisticated bluff? Karp could imagine a defense lawyer saying to a jury, “Ladies and gentlemen: can you really believe that this intelligent, successful businessman would use his own car, bearing his own license, to commit an assassination in broad daylight?”

  Well, yes, Karp could believe it. In his twelve years with the D.A. he had seen acts of egregious stupidity on the part of defendants that made this license-plate business look like the special theory of relativity. Still, the defense always used the “can you believe?” argument. And sometimes it worked.

  Karp was not as sanguine as Roland about the lock they supposedly had on Mehmet Ersoy’s purported killer. On the other hand, Roland knew what he was doing. He was the best of Karp’s twenty-nine prosecutors, a man with a record in homicide prosecutions nearly as good as Karp’s own, which was the best ever. But had he been the worst, Karp still would not have interfered, except to correct some obvious legal or procedural boner. Karp could cajole, criticize, even humiliate his minions, but the A.D.A. in charge of a case was in charge of the case. To behave otherwise, to second guess, to countermand decisions, was to court chaos. Karp could not supervise the prosecution of all the thousand-odd murder cases that Manhattan produced each year. A thousand and climbing.

  This rule, of course, did not apply to the D.A. himself, who felt free to intrude in any case that took his fancy. What took his fancy were the cases with high political profiles. Rich people or famous people getting killed. The bizarre ones that stuck to the front pages and appeared on the nightly news. Cases involving the interests of his friends, or acquaintances, or anyone with a nice suit who could grab him for fifteen minutes.

  Karp was often able to ignore these intrusions or confound them. The D.A. was not a trial lawyer and never had been. If it was up to him, there wouldn’t be any trials at all, just gentlemanly discussions between defense and prosecution leading to a plea bargain and another cleared case.

  Unfortunately for the D.A., without the capacity to go to trial and win an overwhelming proportion of the time, the plea-bargaining system would not work. The defendants would laugh in your face. Karp won trials, murder trials especially, which was why he was able to get away with what he got away with.

  Karp moved closer to the window, resting his forehead against the cool glass. From this angle he could see the green street sign that dedicated the foot of Leonard Street to the former D.A., the legendary Francis P. Garrahy. Garrahy had died six years ago, an act for which Karp had just begun to forgive him. Karp’s heart still lived in the D.A.’s office that Garrahy had created and run for three decades: an organization of uncompromising legal probity, dominated by men whose natural home was the courtroom. In that organization the cream had risen to the old homicide bureau, of which Karp had briefly been a part.

  When Bloom had got in, the first thing he had done was to dissolve the homicide bureau and assign homicide cases at random to a series of identical Criminal Courts bureaus. It made more sense administratively, went the argument, which meant it made sense to a man who had never tried a murder case and saw no difference between murder and any other crime.

  But murder was different. The emotional currents and the legal intricacies that surrounded murder cases were unique, even in a state, like New York at the time, which had no death penalty. A homicide bureau had to be a special sort of place.

  Karp had recently been given a recreated homicide bureau, not because Bloom had seen the light but because Karp had caught him at so much chicanery, malfeasance, and blundering so often that, although Karp had never even hinted at a quid pro quo, Bloom’s politician’s soul had cried out that Karp must be given something big and substantial, that by such a gift his fate might be more closely tied to Bloom’s own. Besides which there was the chance that, in the dangerous world of murder trials, Karp might one day screw up so badly that Bloom could dump him publicly, and with the approbation of the vulgar herd.

  Past the foot of Leonard Street, and barely in Karp’s field of view, was a small park called Columbus Park. At this moment a dozen or so elderly Chinese had gathered on the new grass to do their morning t’ai chi. Karp admired their movements for a few minutes and then, as he turned away from the window to get back to work, imitated one of the positions, holding his hands high, balancing on his left foot, and sweeping his right foot across to the left.

  Karp was a naturally graceful man, and the movement might have even pleased the Chinese had not Karp’s left knee collapsed, sending him crashing into a couple of conference table chairs and to the floor.

  He lay there cursing and gritting his teeth against the fierce pain jabbing up from his bad knee. A dark, worried face appeared upside down over the edge of the conference table.

  “Are you all right?” asked Connie Trask, his secretary.

  Karp flushed and managed to get his good leg under him. Trask rushed around the table to give him a hand, but he waved her off and, groaning, struggled to his feet.

  “You ought to see a doctor,” said the secretary.

  “I don’t need a doctor, Connie. I’m fine. I just tripped.”

  She looked at him doubtfully. “Hmmph. Tell it to the marines! You’ve been shuffling around here like the wreck of the Hesperus for weeks. You and that leg—”

  “It’s the weather changing …”

  “I thought that was when it got cold. It’s getting warm now.”

  Karp moved around to his desk and sat down heavily in his chair, elevating the left leg on the edge of a desk drawer permanently pulled out for that purpose. He scowled and snapped, “Connie, we know you’re a grandmother, but you’re not my grandmother, okay?”

  “Lucky for you,” she replied. “Meanwhile, you got an appointment waiting. Guy wants to work here, don’t ask me why. You want me to send him in?”

  “Give me a couple of minutes.”

  She nodded and left. Karp massaged his knee and flexed it gingerly. It felt like bits of pea gravel were trapped under the cartilage. It was nearly twenty years gone since a big USC guard had come crashing down on that joint, ending Karp’s basketball career at Berkeley and the possibility of a bid from the pros. The memory of that moment of pain could still nauseate him.

  And as it had turned out, Karp had gotten to play for the pros, a brief debut the past winter on a New York team as part of a murder investigation. His knee had sufficed for six weeks of not very strenuous play, but had not been the same since. For now, however, Karp’s will was as strong as his knee was shaky. He willed the pain away and looked up brightly as his appointment walked in.

  The branch of Metropolitan Jewelers run by Aram Tomasian was located on 42nd just west of Lexington. There, at ten on the Monday after, appeared the two detectives, Frangi and Wayne. They had with them the search warrant hastily but perfectly drafted by Roland Hrcany, ordering them to search for a list of specific items, including weapons and clothing and “any other articles and instruments used in the commission of the said crime.”

  There was a clerk in attendance at the glassed counter, and when the two officers identified themselves, she brought Tomasian out from the back of the shop. Tomasian was wearing an old-fashioned tan work smock and a loupe attached to an elastic band. It stuck up from his forehead like a stumpy horn.

  Tomasian seemed anxious, and again he surprised them. He asked, “Are you here about Gaby?”

  They had to think a moment. Frangi said, “Gaby. You mean your girlfriend.”

  “Yes,” said Tomasian. “I called her after I talked to you yesterday
and I couldn’t reach her. I tried her half a dozen times and then I gave up and went over to her place. I have a key. She wasn’t there. I called her work and a couple of her friends, and nobody seems to know where she is.”

  Tomasian seemed genuinely worried, but, on the other hand, Wayne, for one, thought that Tomasian might turn out to be a considerable actor. He had been too cool on the day of the murder, and too cute.

  Wayne said, “Why were you so interested in reaching her?”

  Tomasian uttered a sound of annoyance and exasperation. “Why? She’s my girlfriend. I wanted to talk to her. I knew you guys would be coming to see her and—”

  “You wanted to get your story straight. Your alibi,” Frangi interrupted.

  “It’s not a ‘story,’” snapped Tomasian. “I was concerned. She’s not the kind of person that police visit. I wanted to talk to her. Is that a crime?”

  Wayne removed a paper from his coat pocket and smoothed it out on the glass counter. “This is a search warrant, Mr. Tomasian. It gives us authority to search your business premises and your home.”

  Tomasian looked briefly at the document. A flush appeared along his cheekbones, and he licked his lips. The sight of this discomfort brought a surge of gladness to the heart of Detective Wayne. Tomasian said hesitantly, “Look, my apartment, fine, but this store—it’s not my property. It belongs to my father; I just manage it for him.”

  “It’s your place of business, Mr. Tomasian,” said Wayne, “and it’s described in the warrant.”

  Tomasian sighed and told his clerk to pull down the shades and lock the front door. The two detectives began to search.

  There was nothing in the display cases out front except jewelry and the accoutrements of the jewelry trade. The back of the store looked more promising. It held a substantial jeweler’s workshop: a long, scarred wooden table covered with tools and bits of shining wire, a high stool before it, and the wall it faced was lined with cabinets and boxes full of tiny drawers. A small desk was placed at one end of the room, and this held a phone, a Rolodex, and assorted papers. It was flanked by a tan four-drawer filing cabinet. And then there was the safe.

  It was a green steel room the size of an apartment bathroom, its two thick doors hanging open invitingly. Wayne and Frangi moved toward it instinctively: if a suspect owns a safe, of course that’s the first place you look for the good stuff. The safe was lined floor to ceiling with metal shelves, upon which were stacked long, flat steel boxes and open bins. The bins, they found, contained gold and silver wires of different gauges and in sheets, as well as various semiprecious stones and jewelers’ findings. The boxes held gems and finished pieces. Under one of the lower shelves there was a steel-bound footlocker, painted olive drab and locked with a heavy hasp and padlock.

  The detectives pulled the locker out into the center of the safe. Tomasian was sitting on his stool, watching them. Wordlessly he held out a key ring, holding it up by a small brass key. Wayne took the key and opened the footlocker.

  Three hours later, the detectives were in Roland Hrcany’s office, sucking on illicit cans of beer and feeling pleased with what had gone down.

  “He give you any grief?” asked their host.

  “No, he went like a lamb,” answered Frangi. “Same thing at his apartment. We checked the closet, and there was the red and blue parka, just like the witness described. We also picked up a lot of paper—stuff about this Armenian Secret Army—leaflets, posters. We even got carbons of a couple letters he sent to the Turkish embassy at the U.N.”

  “Threats?”

  “You could say that, but it’s kind of vague what he was gonna do if they didn’t come across. But they weren’t love notes.”

  “But you didn’t find the ski mask?”

  “No,” said Frangi, “but that don’t mean much. It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to trash.”

  “I presume he’s still denying the whole thing?”

  Wayne said, “Yep. We read him his rights and he clammed up. He sticks to the line he was with his girlfriend, who’s still among the missing, and he didn’t know who the other guy at the shooting was because he wasn’t at any shooting.”

  “So what do you think? He’ll keep sticking to it?” asked Roland.

  Wayne said, “Yeah. This boy’s no scuzzball off the block; you’re gonna have to take it the distance, Roland, unless we turn up the partner.”

  “Any leads on that?”

  “Nothing so far, but we haven’t been through his papers completely yet. We’ll find him.”

  Roland nodded and picked up a piece of paper on which Wayne had written an inventory of the items seized from Tomasian’s home and business.

  “Okay, what about these guns?”

  Wayne said, “He had a damn armory in that footlocker. The pistols are new, some of them still in boxes, but a couple could have been fired. Walther P5’s, 9mm. Then we got two H&K 54 submachine guns, also 9mm, also new, with the packing grease still on them, plus about three thousand rounds of 9mm. Parabellum.”

  “That’s what the vic was shot with, right?”

  “Right. And illegal as hell, the bunch of it.”

  “What’s his story? You ask him?”

  “A shooting club. Self-protection for Armenian businessmen. He picked the stuff up in Germany, he says. Goes over a couple times a year to buy gems. He doesn’t deny he smuggled the weapons in. Says he got a good deal, he didn’t think it was any big thing.”

  “How wrong he was,” said Roland. “Meanwhile, we’ll do the ballistics on all the weapons, just to make sure he didn’t use them and then clean them up and rebox them. Now what about this assassination gun?”

  Frangi smiled. “Uh-huh. You don’t see many like that. In fact, there weren’t that many to begin with. It’s an old World War II, what they call a grease gun, an M3 submachine gun chambered for the 9mm. Parabellum, but this one’s modified with a built-in silencer in the barrel. They made about a thousand of them for the OSS during the war. Shoot thirty rounds out of that thing, it’d make no more noise than a wet fart in an elevator.”

  Hrcany seemed about to say something but didn’t. Instead he let out a hard laugh. “Also for protection and sport, no doubt?”

  “I don’t know; that one he wouldn’t talk about,” said Frangi.

  Hrcany picked a heavy spring-type hand exerciser from his desk and began to squeeze the handles without apparent effort. The muscles in his forearms flexed dramatically. He thought for a minute in silence as he pumped.

  “Okay, like you said, do the papers. Find the other guy. Do the ballistics. Get the witnesses in to look at the car and Tomasian—I know he was masked, but let’s go through the drill.”

  “They got a rubber print off the car at the scene,” offered Wayne.

  “Yeah, that too,” said Roland. “Every little bit helps.” He looked at his watch. “Okay, let’s see this bozo now. I got a full day.”

  The initial Q. & A. with Aram Tomasian did not in any way diminish Hrcany’s belief that he had in custody the murderer of Mehmet Ersoy. Tomasian had a lawyer present, so Roland could not get away with his famous screaming wildman act, but he was able to confront the suspect with: his hatred of Turks; his possession of the requisite hardware and the right car; his inability to account for his whereabouts at the time of the crime and for hours on either side of it.

  Tomasian’s response to all this was weak. The alibi was a joke. Even if the girlfriend showed up, her testimony was hardly gilt-edged. Tomasian admitted the letters but denied the license plate. His plate had been stolen ten days before the crime. He had reported it to the police. He had not used his car in the interim, while he waited for a replacement plate to be issued. Or so he said.

  Not a bad Q. & A., Roland thought. He had enough to charge, enough to indict. When the lab stuff proved out, he’d have enough to convict. A nice package.

  Delivering this package to Karp was a moment Roland had keenly anticipated, one that in his imaginings would be second on
ly to the one when the jury returned a guilty verdict in People v. Tomasian. Roland and Karp went back a long way. They had entered Garrahy’s old operation on the same day. In a system that put a premium on toughness, on hard work for little reward, on success in the arena of the court, both had flourished. Karp had perhaps flourished a little more, but that was because, Roland had told himself in his secret heart, Karp had sucked up to old Garrahy in politics and gotten hold of a bureau chief’s job in the Criminal Courts Bureau.

  Still, Roland considered himself Karp’s equal in the courtroom, and more than his equal in the battle of life. Roland had done well in the market; Karp lived on his ungenerous salary. He had a parade of young lovelies in his bed; Karp was married to a one-eyed woman who, by all Roland’s experience of her, was a massive pain in the ass. He lived in a five-room apartment in the Village; Karp lived in a converted SoHo factory. He had a perfect body: Karp was a semi-cripple.

  On the other hand … what was it on the other hand? Roland had trouble pinning it down. Something about Karp irked him mightily. Perhaps it was his refusal to be patronized by Roland, his refusal to recognize that there was a contest going on. Karp was playing, and playing well, but he wasn’t watching the score.

  When Hrcany entered the office, Karp had his leg up on his desk and was engaged in wrapping an Ace bandage tightly around his left knee. Roland grinned and said, “You got another call from the pros? They can’t live without your two-inch jumper?”

  Karp returned a bleak look. “Screw the pros. I’m hoping I can make it to the can and back.” With a movement of his head he indicated the case file Roland was carrying. “That the U.N. thing?”

  Roland slapped the folder on Karp’s desk and sat down. “Yeah, it’s wrapped up. How do you like that?”

  Karp’s eyebrows rose a notch. “No kidding? The warrant paid off, huh?”

  “Jackpot. The guy had an armory in his safe. We got threatening letters to the Turks. We got the parka he wore. It’s all over but the details.” He quickly filled Karp in on what the police had found.