“Himself, eh? What did His Excellency want?”
“He did not vouchsafe to me, Mr. Karp. But Mary said it was important . . . about a murder, she said. Mr. Hrcany is in there now. And the other one.”
Which was Fuller. Fuller, inevitably, was the sort of little toad who puffed himself up by oppressing staff and was widely resented. This he took as a token of his effectiveness in administration.
Karp went into his private office and flipped through the pink squares. Only one was of immediate interest. He pushed the button.
“You found out something,” he said when Clay Fulton picked up.
“Yeah. That incident we were discussing.”
“Why did the chicken cross the road?”
“That one. I’m in the information business, so it was not unusual for me to ask for all the stolen-car reports put out on the evening in question and their time of transmission. Guess what I found out?”
“That the chicken crossed the road before the car in question was reported stolen,” said Karp confidently.
“You got it.”
“Which means that he crossed the road for some other reason, which means that he was pursuing the driver and not the car.”
“I would say that’s a reasonable assumption,” said Fulton after a brief pause.
“What’re we going to do?”
“You know, all in all, I think St. John’s is going to whip Duke. A good big guy is going to take a good small guy every time.”
“Not if the small guy is very fast and very sneaky.”
“Nice talking to you, Stretch. If you take my meaning.”
After he hung up, Karp had this thought: I’m becoming a pain in the ass to my friends. After taking some moments to recover from the irritation and anger this revelation occasioned, he grabbed one of his ledgers and walked to Keegan’s office, remembering at the last moment to bring his face back to neutral. The DA was at the head of his conference table, flanked by Fuller and Hrcany. He looked pale, and there was a pinched expression on his face that Karp did not recall seeing there before. Fear? They all looked up when Karp entered and took the chair at the foot.
“What’s up?” he asked, to which Keegan glowered, Roland rolled eyes upward, and Fuller said, “We have a problem.”
“It’s not a problem, Norton,” Hrcany replied. “We call them cases. Somebody shoots somebody else, we investigate and come to a conclusion, and then we indict or don’t indict the shooter.”
This was Fuller’s turn to roll his eyes.
Karp looked directly at Keegan. “Jack, what’s going on?”
Keegan said, “A little while ago, I got a call from Shelly Solotoff. You remember Shelly, Butch?”
“Yeah, I had lunch with him last week.”
“He’s representing Sybil Marshak. Apparently, one day last week she shot a mugger in a garage midtown and fled the scene. She called Solotoff this morning, and he called me. We are now deciding how to handle this mess.”
“What mess?” asked Karp disingenuously. “Roland just pointed out we have a procedure here. Why don’t we follow it?”
“Oh, please!” snapped Fuller. “It’s absurd to pretend Sybil Marshak is the same as some drugged-up kid with a gun.”
“She’s no kid,” said Roland. “You got that right, Norton.”
“But she had a gun,” said Karp. “Drugs we don’t know. Did Shelly say anything about drugs?”
“Very funny,” said Fuller sourly. “But the press is going to be all over us in a very short time, and we need to get our ducks in a row. Obviously, we can stall for a little bit, feed them some junk about the continuing investigation, and no comment until the results are in, but afterward . . . I mean she is absolutely fucking key to the campaign. I mean she controls something over thirty percent of the typical primary vote in Manhattan—”
“And?” Karp interrupted.
Fuller was taken aback. “Well . . . clearly, we have to ensure that
. . . ah . . .” He hung up, fumfering.
“Yeah, it’s hard to come right out and say it,” Karp observed. “Because putting the screws to some poor schmuck for political reasons, that’s business as usual. But easing off on someone for political reasons is a crime, isn’t it?”
“Who said anything about easing off?” Fuller protested. “I never used any such language.”
Karp ignored this, and turned to Hrcany. “We have some facts, I presume.”
“Yeah, I talked to Jim Raney, at Midtown South. The vic is a homeless named Ramsey, Desmondo. A short sheet for dope possession and trespass. Nothing but jail time. No violence, no weapons charges. The body was found in a garage on Fifty-fifth off Broadway, dead a couple of hours when they found it. Anonymous call. Well, it being a homeless, they figured it for another one off that serial killer and shifted it to the task force that’s running that thing, a detective Paradisio over at the One-seven, and it rattled around there for a while, until they decided it wasn’t the same guy after all, and Ed Rastenberg, Paradisio’s partner, shot it back to Midtown. So it’s a little stale by now, but Raney goes into it, the usual, known associates, any enemies, and so forth. A blank. Okay, this is a bum, so we’re not burning overtime here, but, to his credit, Raney persists, and he gets the idea of checking the cars in the garage where it took place. Turns out there’s a video camera at the entrance that picks up the license plates pretty good, and he runs the plates of everyone whose car was in the garage at the time of or thereabouts. Not an easy job, but they did it. And they get a list of names and start calling, just fishing, really, did anyone see this guy, anything peculiar. Marshak was one of the ones got called.”
Hrcany paused there, significantly.
“This was yesterday?” Karp asked.
“Yeah, and this morning she calls her lawyer and comes in. Doesn’t look so good for Sybil. Leaving the scene. Lying low. Only gets a conscience when the cops are nosing around. Naughty, naughty Sybil, and her such a big liberal. Her story is she was in shock, post–traumatic stress, and she’s very sorry.”
“Raney interviewed her?” Karp asked.
“Yeah, with her attorney present, so he didn’t get a hell of a lot. He says she says Ramsey came at her with a knife, and she plugged him. Calls it in to 911 later without giving a name, which checks out. But”—Hrcany paused significantly—“there was no knife recovered at the scene. There was a watch, though, a Lady Rolex, gold, in the vic’s pocket.”
“Marshak’s watch,” said Fuller. “That proves it. He ripped her off and she—”
“No,” said Hrcany, grinning, “not Marshak’s. She doesn’t know anything about any watch. She said it was a knife he was flashing. But right now: knife, no; watch, yes.
“Witnesses?” asked Karp.
“As a matter of fact,” Hrcany replied, “Marshak said she thought she did see another man hanging out in the background while Ramsey allegedly assaulted her. Another black guy; she said she’d recognize him again. The cops are looking, but”—he waved his hand dismissively— “basically, what we have here is woman shoots and kills unarmed man, and we have only her word that he threatened her. I think we can maintain man deuce, plus leaving the scene.”
“Manslaughter two?” cried Fuller in outrage. “Are you crazy! Sybil Marshak? Christ, the woman’ll be a hero to every woman who ever got accosted in a parking garage. And her word—hell, if you can’t trust a woman like that, who the hell can you trust?”
Karp and Hrcany looked at each other. Hrcany’s eyes almost vanished beneath their upper lids. The DA was examining the tip of his unlit cigar, as if the solution had been written there in tiny letters by a remarkably prescient Nicaraguan.
Hrcany said, “Okay, Norton, we’ll let her off with a warning, and not only that, we’ll sponsor a law. Any rich white bitch with a gun gets to kill one poor black guy and no hard feelings. Or maybe we should make it two, or three.”
“Oh, get real, Roland!” Fuller snarled. “Why the hell shouldn’t we take her
word for it? It’s not like she knew the guy, that she had something to gain from shooting him. What, you think she was a crazed racist? Marshak? The woman marched in Selma, for crying out loud! She’s the biggest ACLU bleeding heart in the city. She had to be in legitimate fear of her life, or she never would’ve done it. I mean, if you can’t see that . . .”
Karp noticed that Fuller got white when angry, while Hrcany got red, and wondered idly whether this meant anything about their characters. Hrcany was just beginning a sarcastic rant to the effect that people accused of crimes often took liberties with the truth, when Karp said, almost to himself, “She probably was in fear of her life. She thought she was being stalked.”
They all stared at him. “How do you know that?” the DA asked.
“She was a client of my wife’s. Or, no, I think she just came in for a consult. Marlene trailed around after her for a couple of days, but couldn’t spot anyone. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t being followed by someone.”
“See! There you are,” crowed Fuller.
“Not really,” said Karp coldly. “It just means she was spooked. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the shooting we have here. Look, this is a premature discussion. I don’t know why we’re here. Clearly, there’s a prima facie case against Ms. Marshak on the evidence as it now stands. We should charge her, as Roland suggests, with manslaughter second and see what develops. The police may find the witness, and depending on what he says, and whether we believe him or not, we can reconsider the charges, up or down.” He looked at the DA. “Or am I wrong, Jack? Are we really starting to throw naked political influence into the balance when we assess charges?”
Keegan held his gaze for what seemed a long time before he looked away, and then there was a quick, barely perceptible glance at Fuller. The DA said, “No, of course not. We’ll charge her and see what happens with the witness, if any. It’s early days yet on this.”
The meeting dispersed, although Keegan motioned Fuller to stay behind to talk press and politics.
Karp motioned Hrcany to step into his office. “What do you think?”
“Of all that?” Hrcany gestured in the direction of the DA’s office. “Pure politics. I think Jack’s running scared on this election, and the little scumbag is feeding off it. We haven’t had a serious contested election for DA in I don’t know how long, and now we do. McBright is waving the figures for how we charge people on account of their race, heavier the blacker, and how we never go after bad cops or corrupt landlords or the kind of respectable people who make a good living off the misery of the downtrodden, et cetera. It’s a pile of shit, we know that, but we also have an electorate that’s more swayed by that kind of thing than it used to be. If McBright really gets the vote out uptown, Jack’s in trouble. Let’s say he holds on to the unions, the cops and all, and he loses the beautiful mosaic—then the white guilty-liberal vote is the swing, and now we got a leader of that vote up for homicide. I think it’s rich.” He laughed unpleasantly.
“I mean, do you think Jack or Fuller is going to . . . I don’t know, screw up this case in some way to win the election?”
“Not to win the election, no. But Jack’s not worried only about the election or, mainly, to tell the truth. I don’t know if even little Norton understands that. Did you see him? He’s scared shitless about his federal judgeship. He sees it flying away with old Sybil because if she goes down for this and the party thinks Jack didn’t pull every wire he could to get her off, he’ll never get sponsored, unless he moves to North Dakota and starts a new life under an assumed name. Sybil’s got strings to every politician in the state.”
“And this cuts no ice with you,” said Karp dully. Roland’s attitude always tended to annoy him a little, and now it annoyed him a lot. Although Roland had supported the outcome Karp sought, a pursuit of the case without fear or favor, it was clear that the man had a personal issue with the accused.
“No ice at all, buddy. Oh, I’m going to love nailing that hypocritical bitch. It will give me an enormous amount of pleasure to put her fat ass in jail for a long time.”
“Assuming she’s guilty.”
“Yeah, right,” said Hrcany dismissively. “Actually, I’d like it better if Marshak was the bum slasher, but this’ll have to do.”
“So you’re saying that Marshak was not officially a client of ours,” said Lou Osborne.
“Not officially,” said Marlene. They were in Osborne’s office, an expensive area that yielded nothing in modernity to Captain Picard’s office on the starship Enterprise —the expected glass and chrome, and the smooth and snaky molded wooden desk and cabinets, and chairs like clever steel-and-fabric traps. Osborne had to be content with non-imaginary technology though, and he had a lot of it—a computer workstation behind his desk on an AnthroCart, and two large-screen monitors set into a bookcase that lined one wall. One of these had a stock market feed on it, and the other had CNN running silently. The other walls, those that weren’t windows, contained Osborne’s photos-with-the-famous collection and various awards and testimonials, and a large, bland abstract oil.
To Osborne’s questioning look, she responded, “Someone comes in and says they’re being stalked, the first thing we do is find out if there’s any solid evidence for it. Otherwise we’re running a therapy shop, not a security operation. Even VIPs are nuts sometimes, hard as that is to believe.”
“But there was a real stalker with Marshak, wasn’t there?” He poked his chin at the TV screen. “They’re saying that’s why she had the gun, she was in fear of her life.”
“That may well be, but, in fact, no one we saw followed her into that garage. We were there. In fact, Marshak almost ran me over getting away. Now, I’m not saying she wasn’t so spooked that some bum walks up to her to ask her the time and she plugs him in a panic. I actually told her to get rid of that gun.”
“And you’re a witness. You’re going to have to testify against her, that you saw her there at the time of the shooting. And they’ll say she came to you expressing fear and you told her to, in effect, see a psychiatrist. Jesus Christ! That’s why we have a VIP department in the first place. A prominent woman walks in here, I don’t care if she says she’s being chased by Martians, you put someone with her!”
He stared at her briefly, that cold Secret Service–Marine Corps stare, and then his eyes flicked up to the TV screen.
She decided not to get mad. “Lou, relax—you know this isn’t about me, or about Sybil Marshak. I take it there’s no news about Perry or his people?”
“Not a word. Oleg flew out there the minute we heard, of course, and he’s off in the mountains with a crew he put together. God knows he’s got enough contacts out East there, but . . . they don’t even know if it’s political, Serbs or Albanians, or just a gang of freelancers.”
“Assuming there’s much difference. Have you thought about delaying the offering?”
At this, Osborne tossed a glance at the stock market screen, where he had hoped to see his own stock floating ever upward the day after tomorrow. “I’ve been on the phone with the underwriters all morning. They’re panicking. If we don’t go out on schedule, it’ll be a signal to the market that we don’t have our shit together. It’ll be years if ever before we can float another one.” Again the glance at the screen. “It’s like voodoo; once you have the curse, it’s hard to get clean again. What about that singer?”
“Kelsie? A problem, too. But we’re covering her at the depth she needs without involving her people. We got a man in the building, twenty-four/seven, and we follow her when she’s out. She knows about that, but not about the inside guy.”
“And this Coleman? The stalker?”
“He’s out and we’re looking for him, but . . . it’s not like we’re the cops. I got Wayne on it.”
“Fine, fine . . . but, Marlene?” Here he shrugged into his inspiring-boss persona. It was a little frayed just now, but she had to applaud the effort. “Let’s make an extra effort to ensure that n
o one newsworthy gets into trouble this week? Please?”
“I’ll try. And don’t worry too much about the IPO. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Fastest-growing business in the U.S., la-di-da.”
A thin smile. “Lap of the gods, right. Aren’t you spending the money already? Everyone else is, including my wife and kids. What have we got you down for—one point two million shares.”
“Yeah, just like Harry. At three cents a share, what does that come to? A whole year’s worth of Big Macs.”
“No, Marlene, that’s not the way it works. Your strike price is set at six and a half. We’re planning to offer at eight, which means that you don’t make any money at all unless . . .” He stopped, because his vice president for special security had her eyes crossed and her fingers in her ears and was going wah-wah-wah.
“Well, I’m glad someone around here’s still happy,” said Osborne.
Lucy Karp was lying on her back inside a narrow metal tube full of clanging noise. In her ears were air-powered earphones, like the ones that serve out dull music to passengers in flight, and there was a similarly designed microphone in front of her mouth. Through the headset a man was speaking phrases in German and then repeating them in English. Lucy repeated the German phrases and answered the question asked. It was simplified language, the kind native speakers use with children and foreigners (What is your name? My name is Lucy. How old are you? I am seventeen. That is a table. That is a chair). Over the next few days, she would be introduced to the elements of grammar, a vocabulary of about sixteen hundred words, and a raft of idiomatic expressions. At the end of the week she expected that she would be indistinguishable, except for a certain poverty of expression, from a native speaker of that language. As she spoke the words and acquired the language and perfected her pronunciation, the magnetic-resonance-imaging machine was recording the flow of blood to different areas of her brain. Pictures of this would later be printed out in brilliant false colors and distributed to scientists around the world, who would argue interminably about what, if anything, the patterns meant.
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