Irresistible Impulse bkamc-9

by Robert Tanenbaum

  The crowd was dense in the center of the street, especially where the projecting stalls narrowed the way into choke points. She stepped up on a handy milk crate and was able to spot Karp’s head bobbing above the throng, one great advantage of marriage to a giant. She cut between the stalls to the sidewalk, which presented an easier passage, and passed the monastery church, where she noted that the take this year was pretty good. There was a statue of the saint set up, surrounded by a fence of chicken wire, into which people had stuffed currency, lots of high-denomination currency. There were people passing all around, but no one in particular was guarding the cash, it being well known in the neighborhood what would happen to anyone who stole from the saint. It would be a fate requiring the intercession of neither heaven nor the NYPD: extremely unpleasant and extremely Sicilian.

  The thought of this brushed Marlene’s mind, and she wondered what the principle of double effect would have to say about the (very) occasional good deeds performed by the Mob, and in what way she differed from its members. She shook her head in annoyance and chased the thoughts-what you got from hanging out with Jesuits.

  The people who lived along Sullivan Street had set up aluminum lawn chairs for the old folks, now assembled in little groups to gossip and enjoy the evening. Passing around one of these, Marlene almost collided with a young woman whose face was familiar.

  “Tamara?”

  “Oh, hi,” said the woman unenthusiastically.

  “How’re you doing?”

  “Oh, you know, okay, I guess.”

  “Any more … you know …?”

  Marlene didn’t like what she saw in the woman’s eyes when she said this. The last she had heard, the lovely but unwise Ms. Morno was no longer receiving unwanted attentions from Arnie Nobili. She gave Morno a quick once-over. Hair clean and shiny, face unmarked, V-neck aqua sweater with the sleeves pushed up, skin-tight white jeans, heeled sandals. Apparently, a young Italian-American woman in fine shape.

  Tamara said, “No, not since you know, last year.”

  “Arnie’s still off the sauce?”

  Shrug, a worried look. “I don’t know. Look, I got to go back. My grandmother lives here, I got the whole family …”

  Marlene let her go with a smile and an indication that she should call whenever she felt the need. She walked a few yards down the sidewalk, cut between a pair of booths, and there was her family. Karp had bought zeppole all around. He handed her a warm bag of the little golden spheres of sweet dough sprinkled with powdered sugar.

  Marlene accepted it and looked at her sons and laughed. The little fat faces were covered in grease and white powder. Each had a tiny paper bag of zeppole with which they were doing all the things that children of that age do with soft, edible items in bags. Lucy exhibited elaborate disgust and ate her own zeppole like a duchess. The dog hovered pantingly in front of the stroller, its massive head poised to catch any fragments, of which there were many dropped. Marlene linked arms with her husband and chewed her ancestral bread, thinking warm and satisfying thoughts.

  Suddenly, the dog growled, a deep, alarming sound. Marlene startled, looked at her dog, looked at where the dog was looking. A man was pushing through the crowd. He passed them almost near enough to touch. He was dirty, unshaven, and even through the odors of the fair, Marlene could smell the chemical stench of the chronic boozer. The dog snarled and bared its teeth. Marlene saw that the man was Arnie Nobili. He was wearing a loose, orange-striped sports shirt over a grubby old-fashioned undershirt, and filthy gray work pants. He vanished between two booths, heading for the sidewalk beyond.

  Marlene felt ice form in her belly. She knew exactly where he was going. She pressed the bag of zeppole into Karp’s hand and said, “I got to do something.”

  Karp saw the expression on her face and felt a stab of fear. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Marlene?”

  She disappeared between the stalls. “Marlene!” he called again, louder, and then pushed the stroller after her, followed by Posie, Lucy, and the dog.

  “Arnie!” Marlene called. “Arnie, wait up! Stop!”

  Nobili stumbled, looked over his shoulder. His face, stupid with drink and mindless determination, twisted into a scowl as he recognized her. He skittered around clumsily to face her, reached behind his back, and pulled a large blue revolver out from his waistband. He pointed this at her menacingly, backed away a few steps, and then continued on his path.

  There were shouts, a scream, but these were lost in the general noise of the fair. Marlene saw a woman run into a building. A man grabbed two young children and pressed them to the wall. She was ten feet from Nobili. Over his shoulder she saw a blur of aqua blue and white. He stopped and extended his arm, pointing the gun at Tamara Morno.

  “MAR …!” Karp shouted.

  Marlene cleared her pistol from its holster. Nobili’s gun went off. Shrieks and screams.

  Marlene could not see if the woman had been hit. She heard the sounds of the stroller’s wheels approaching behind her.

  “… LEEE …” said Karp.

  Marlene had the front sight of her pistol in the center of Nobili’s back. She fired twice. Nobili stiffened, threw his arms wide, and dropped to his knees. Marlene saw Tamara Morno flattened against a wall, an overturned lawn chair at her feet. She saw Arnie Nobili lift his pistol again, slowly but steadily. He couldn’t miss her.

  “… NNNN!” Karp finished.

  She shot Nobili twice more, once in the back and then in the back of the head. He dropped the pistol and fell slowly forward until his face touched the sidewalk, so that for a moment he looked as if he were worshipping something only he could see. Then his body slumped sideways and was still. Tamara Morno was gone.

  Marlene’s ears were ringing from the shots. She turned slightly, and there was her whole family in a line on the sidewalk, looking at her, as in a dream. Her husband was shouting something at her, and there was an expression on his face that she did not recall ever seeing before. She had to sit down. She tottered on legs that had gone quivery over to a lawn chair and sat down on it. She put her hands on her knees and dropped her head down between her legs and fought to control the nausea. When she lifted her head back up, she saw two police officers pointing their pistols at her.

  “Don’t tell me Rohbling tried it again,” said the district attorney over the phone.

  “No,” said Karp, “and I wouldn’t have called you this late, but I got a real mess here and you need to know about it. Marlene just shot and killed a guy on Sullivan Street.”

  A pause and a whispered “Jesus Christ!” Then, “Where are you now?”

  “At home. I had the kids to handle also … I didn’t think it was smart for me to get involved down at the precinct.”

  “Right. She’s being held at the Six?”

  “Uh-huh. I called Joe Lerner. He’s going to go over there.”

  “Good move. Okay, as of now I’m suspending you from supervisory tasks in the Homicide Bureau, except as they relate to Rohbling, until this case is resolved. You’re out of the chain of command. I also officially tell you not to discuss this case with anyone in this office. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Good. Now, as friends, off the record, how bad is it?”

  “Fairly bad. She shot the guy four times in the back. Name was Nobili. He was going after one of her clients with a pistol. The cops have the pistol, one shot fired, no injuries, also no client. The woman took off running. They’re looking for her, but …”

  “You were there, you saw all this?”

  “Right, I did. But, Jack … God, I can’t think straight anymore. It went down so fast! One second we’re standing there eating fucking zeppole, the regular happy family at the fair scene, and the next she’s off after this guy who went past us and the next, it’s bang-bang-bang.”

  “Okay,” said the district attorney, “try to put it out of your mind. You have Rohbling on Monday, focus on that. I’ll take care of everything else. Oh, yea
h: what’s the situation with the press?”

  “They’re on it,” said Karp tightly. “Drooling.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Karp was not popular with the courthouse press, who among themselves referred to him as N.K. Two, which stood for No Komment Karp. He considered that he had absolutely no obligation to inform the press about the progress of anything whatever sub judice. Since, in the nature of things, Karp controlled access to some of the hottest items on the calendars of crime, and since the defense bar was generally loquacious, it was difficult to compose a decent war story with balancing quotes from either side, which is all that distinguishes journalism from P.R. and writing about Elvis sightings for the checkout counter press. This rankled, and so the press was more than delighted to learn that the wife of the chief of the Homicide Bureau, and the prosecutor of the biggest case of the year, had herself just been arrested for killing a man on the street.

  There were reporters and a TV crew lying in wait for him on Crosby Street when he came down in the morning. He had expected this and had arranged for a car and driver. It was extremely unpleasant, especially since he had Lucy by the hand. Just as they were about to enter the car, a hard-faced blond woman stuck a tape recorder in Lucy’s face and shouted, “How do you feel about your mom going to jail for murder?”

  In a clear voice Lucy replied, in Cantonese, “Demons will suck your brains out through your eyes, pestilential cockroach.”

  This ran taped on the CBS morning show (translated with some glee by a Chinese-American anchorperson), and for Karp this took some of the sting out of the succeeding shot of Marlene doing the perp walk out of a van toward her arraignment along with a string of whores.

  In Rohbling, the morning was consumed by the next defense witness, Dr. Martin M. Morland, a child psychiatrist who had treated the young Rohbling. Karp objected to the witness on the grounds that Rohbling’s mental condition as a child was irrelevant to the issue of his current sanity, but Peoples cut him off sharply.

  “That was harsh,” whispered Terrell Collins.

  “Yeah,” Karp replied, “the judge figures since he gave us the big ones on the mistrial and the change of venue, he owes Waley. Waley’ll run wild for a couple of days.”

  Morland was a small, cheerful, avuncular man with a monastic fringe of silver hair around his bald head. Waley got him to paint Rohbling as the sickest little boy who ever lived. At present he harbored an all-encompassing obsession with elderly black women, the result of the childhood traumas imposed by Clarice, the nanny. The crazy little boy still lived in the young man and took control, hence the crimes.

  At the lunch break, Karp pushed silently past the press gauntlet and went to his office. He knew he needed something to eat, although his appetite was gone, and called down to a local deli. While waiting, he read the papers. The Times had given the shooting story page one below the fold, an unusually high status for a crime story in the Times, but it was an unusual shooting. The reporter referred to Marlene’s colorful past, noted this was the third person she had killed, and quoted the D.A. as saying that the office would offer no special treatment and that Karp had recused himself from any involvement. The News devoted its front page to a big photograph of the dead man on the sidewalk and the headline vigilante “hit” shocks fair.

  Karp was eating his pastrami sandwich when Roland Hrcany and Ray Guma walked in and sat down at Karp’s conference table, carrying their own brown bags. They nodded to Karp, and Guma said, “So, Roland, what’s the story with Marlene?”

  Karp said, “Guys, I can’t talk about this.”

  Guma put on an affronted expression. “Excuse me, I don’t believe I was addressing you. I was talking to my pal Roland, here.”

  Roland said, “Yeah, you can’t grab lunch in privacy anymore without somebody sticking their nose in. Anyway, Marlene got R.O.R. She’s probably home by now.”

  “That is truly amazing!” exclaimed Guma. He spoke with exaggerated precision, like a rube reading a testimonial for a patent medicine. “She shoots some citizen in the back on a street full of people, and she gets to walk with no bail? What’s the city coming to? Probably it was favoritism, she being a former D.A. and the wife of a big shot.”

  “It might look that way, but nothing could be further from the truth,” said Hrcany in the same stilted tone. “First of all, the vic had a violence sheet on him. Second, he had a gun and fired it. Third, we found the vic’s intended target, the lovely Miss Tamara Morno.”

  “Remarkable!” said Guma. “How was this feat accomplished?”

  “It seems that Dead Harry dragged her into the complaint room this morning, and she wrote out a full statement before the acting bureau chief of the Homicide Bureau-”

  “Yourself, that is.”

  “Myself. And from this it appeared that Miss M. was indeed threatened with death by the vic, who, even when shot twice by the aforesaid Mrs. Karp, still tired to point his weapon at her. The facts of the case support a finding of justifiable homicide, since Mrs. Karp acted to prevent a violent felony. Of course, the grand jury will still have to render a finding, but …”

  “We can rest assured that the grand jurors, guided by yourself, will find likewise with no trouble?”

  “I’m confident of it, Raymond,” said Hrcany. “And you know what? It’s such a nice sunny June day that I think we should take our lunches outside to the park.”

  “Good idea. If we stay here, we might be tempted to discuss the case with Butch Karp, and that would be a violation of official policy.”

  They got up and walked to the door. “Yes,” added Guma, “poor Butch! He must really be worried about what’s going on with his wife.”

  That afternoon Waley finished his direct examination of Dr. Morland, and Karp rose for the cross. A hard thing, cross-examination of a well-prepared, intelligent expert witness, and Karp was not at his peak, hardly even on the upper slopes. He had before him the background investigation of Morland himself, excerpts from Morland’s professional articles, the case notes from Morland’s examination of the child Jonathan, and his most recent examination of the defendant, and the notes he himself had made during Waley’s direct. Out of this material he had to sculpt ex tempore a line of questioning that would convince the jury that however tortured Rohbling’s mind had been back when, and however disturbed he might now be, he had not been legally insane at the time of the crime.

  So, begin with the big question. At the time of the crime, in your opinion, Doctor, did defendant have substantial incapacity to conform his behavior to the requirements of the law? Morland had an opinion. Paranoid ideation. Lack of anchoring to reality. Long minutes of psychobabble drifted by. Karp hacked into it. Did the defendant know who he was? Yes. Did he know where he was? Yes. Did he know what he was doing? That depends on what we mean by “know.” A patronizing smile, and more babble, this time of an epistemological nature. Karp was looking at the jury, saw the eyes glazing. In a minute they would be blaming him for making them go through this. So: break and reverse field. Morland had an article differentiating obsessional character defects from psychosis in children. Using that and the therapy notes, Karp got him to admit that he had never diagnosed Rohbling as psychotic back then. Let that line alone. Change field again. Get an admission that obsessional-character defect was not psychosis. Cut off the doctor when he tried to expand the answer. Karp lost his place, repeated a question, got an objection. Sustained. He bore down. It was hard to keep focused on the mental image of the yellow sheet on which he had written his line of questions. He kept slipping away to night, the colored lights, the noise, gunshots, Marlene standing over the bleeding corpse, the sharp stink of burnt gunpowder wafting by, masking briefly the smell of the fair. Okay, recover. Breathe. His sense was that the cross was running out of steam. Fine. Fall back on the standard: are you being paid by the defendant, Doctor? How much? Then, close with a strong note. Karp asked, “Doctor, why, in your opinion, did the defendant refuse to acknowledge the suitcase?”

>   No sooner were these words out than Karp felt a chill roil through his belly. He couldn’t believe he had asked the question in that form, but there it was, hanging in the air like a thick gas.

  Morland smiled, shrugged, answered in so many words that the defendant was so divorced from reality that he really didn’t understand that it was his suitcase. Try to recover-or was it that he knew the suitcase was full of incriminatory evidence? Pathetic! Objection, of course, witness has answered. Sustained, jury will disregard. A no-brainer. Karp attempted to obscure this disaster by picking at details, secondary stuff, but he had heard that deadly murmur, seen the faces in the jury box.

  Sitting down, he caught Collins’s eye. The kid looked stunned. Judge Peoples checked the clock, asked Waley if he had redirect. Of course Waley did not, he was quite satisfied to leave the witness with Karp having beat himself to death with the blue suitcase. Would Mr. W. like to call his next witness fresh the next morning? Mr. W. would, thank you, Your Honor.

  The crowd of newspeople was thicker than ever outside the courtroom, heading toward the blood Karp had just spilled in the water, yelling and pushing against the court officers trying to keep a lane clear from the courtroom door to the parts of the building restricted to D.A. personnel. How does it feel? How does it feel? Karp wished he could tell them. He was still numb, although this feeling was being replaced by a dull anger, at Marlene, at himself, the two angers inextricably mixed and tangled. A small, neat black man with a cassette machine leaped in front of him.

  “Butch! What happened in there today? Could you respond to the rumors in the black community that you’re throwing the case?”

  Ordinarily, Karp would have said “excuse me” and edged around the man, but there was no room and the lights were blinding and his adrenaline was pumping, and so his body took over as it had been trained to do. He faked a step, the reporter went with it, Karp gave him the hip and cruised by. But instead of merely staggering, the man caught his foot on a power cable and went flying against a sound man, who tripped too, bringing his boom around to catch a cameraman across the temple. The camera went loose, the cameraman lunged and tripped. The heavy camera went flying and landed on the head of the original reporter. Blood flowed. Strobes popped continuously, catching Karp in dozens of shots, looking over the chaos he had caused, the close of a perfect day.