“But you’re good,” she blurted out.
A ghostly smile. “Only God is good, kid. Me? Oh, me, you have no idea.”
8
THE NEXT MORNING LUCY AND HER FATHER, TYPICALLY THE TWO EARLIEST risers in the household, sat companionably at breakfast, Karp whipping through the Times, ignoring the travails of nations, including his own, focusing on the scant crime news and sports. Here a little basketball discussion, March Madness, they were nearly down to the Final Four, when she asked abruptly, “Daddy, the police need a warrant to come into somebody’s house, don’t they?”
“Ordinarily, yes, unless in hot pursuit of a suspected felon,” Karp replied, reading on.
“What if it’s not a regular house or apartment? Like if it’s a little shack where a homeless person is living?”
Karp dropped the paper shield. “Hm. That would depend. If a guy’s sitting on a park bench or sleeping in a doorway, no—it’s a public place. In the home, the governing rule is from Payton v. New York —you need a warrant except in exigent circumstances. The question then is, what’s a home? A homeless shelter is a home under Payton; a cave on government property is not. But there was a case a couple of years back where the cops rousted a guy out of a tent he’d set up in Central Park, and the courts threw out the search. Kind of a nice decision, too; the judge said something to the effect that a place of usual repair at night was a home under the law, regardless of its lack of ordinary amenities.”
“So if cops like came into someone’s shack that they built, and busted up all his stuff, that would be against the law.”
“Well, destroying property without good probable cause is always against the law, warrant or no warrant. An exception would be, for example, if they have reason to suspect there’s drugs hidden in the bodywork of a car, they could tear it apart. This is an actual situation?”
“Yeah. A guy I know who lives down by the yards was raided the other day. They roughed him up and smashed all his things. They were looking for the slasher, but Ali didn’t know anything.”
“They arrested him?”
“No.”
“Interesting. He get the name of the cops? Badge numbers?”
“No. They were detectives, I think. Plainclothes. They were looking for this man, they call him Canman, who had the place where I found Fake Ali’s body. And Ali—I mean Real Ali—he already told another detective what he knew, which was nothing. He’s black—Ali is—and, you know, you think, ‘Oh, it’s more cop racism,’ but one of the two cops was black, so I guess it couldn’t be that. But why would they send two different cops to talk to the same person?”
“Oh, some screwup,” said Karp. “Tell your friend to report the abuse anyway.”
“They won’t really do anything, will they?”
“Probably not, but it adds to the record. The type of cop who racks up a sheet of persistent abuse, sooner or later he’s going to do something they can’t ignore, and at that point, if he’s got fifty complaints against him, the bosses will maybe toss him out on his ear. If not, they might let it slide or defend him.”
“That sucks.”
“What else is new?” Karp agreed, but as he took up his paper again, he was thinking. Detectives harassing the homeless; okay, it happened, they were hot on a trail, sometimes they did not bother with the niceties. A pair of detectives, one white, one black, not exactly common in the NYPD, and they weren’t the team primarily responsible for the slasher murders. That was Paradisio and Rastenberg, a pair of lilies. It could have been some other players from that team, but Karp doubted it. Why? No reason, except that little tingle that told him he was right. The rail yards were right in their stomping grounds, too. Had Cooley and Nash been assigned to the slasher team? Unlikely, and even if so, why would they cover the same ground that other cops already had? Preventing just that, conserving resources, was the whole point of a police task force. Again, the notion that Cooley was pursuing something personal, as with Lomax. Now Detective Cooley wanted this Canman character, but for what? Karp’s eye paused at an article on the New York page: “Marshak Assailant Had Violent Juvenile Record.” Oh, the Times ! Now they’ve decided he was an assailant, not a victim, which went well with the statement of a “source” at the DA that they had not settled on the precise nature of the charges pending further investigation, although second-degree manslaughter could not be ruled out. There was no evidence that Ms. Marshak (the actual assailant here) had been attacked. Police sought a possible witness. Karp wondered who the source was. Roland, probably. More significant was the unnamed source who had sent Ramsey’s juvenile records to the reporter, C. Melville Bateson. A great name for a Times reporter—solid, like the pillars of a public building. Ramsey, it seemed, had done six months in Spofford for armed robbery at age seventeen. Juvenile records were supposed to be sealed, and their revelation at an adult trial was prohibited by law. They were easy enough to obtain, however, if you made the effort, and you wanted to blacken the character of a victim, and you were inside the system; like, for example, Norton Fuller.
As he mused on this, Lucy interrupted his thoughts. “It’s so unjust. Can’t you do anything?”
Karp put the paper down again. “Technically, yes; practically, not much. It would come down to the word of two police officers against that of a homeless man. No case, even if your guy’s telling the absolute truth. It’s an imperfect system.”
“The system!” Contemptuously. “Everyone blames the system, but the system’s made up of people, all of them doing bad things a lot of the time. How do you stand it?”
Karp often wondered the same thing, and now he thought, uncomfortably, of his conversation with Solotoff. Sighing heavily, he replied, “It’s not easy, kid. It is just that it’s better than the obvious alternatives. Letting crime flourish, for example. Arbitrary violence, for example, which is a lot more feel-good than the law. Look at how popular those movies about the Mob and rogue cops are. The law can’t touch the villain, so the hero whacks him out. End of story. But in real life . . . ? You know, your mom was into that for a long time, in real life. Did you like it?”
The girl sniffed. “Oh, I guess not. But can’t you do anything?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Karp, smiling. “I’ll think of something.”
Lucy walked out the door, fully intending to go to school. But as she strode down Lafayette to the Lex station, the events of the past days bore her down. She could not remove from her mind the moment when she had touched Fake Ali’s shoulder, and his body had slid backward, and the wound in his throat had gaped open like an obscene grin. And the fight with Doug, and what the cops had done to the harmless, decent Real Ali. The world was full of death, sin, and depravity, a choking fog. The thought of sitting in a bright classroom full of silly girls, concentrating on the glories of literature or the course of American history, nauseated her, as did the fact that she had been cutting classes fairly regularly and was hopelessly behind, had failed or would fail all her midterms, and owed in the next two weeks term papers in both French lit and American history that she had not started to think about. At the subway station, therefore, she found her body moving as if controlled by an outside force, away from the Lexington line and through the crowded tunnels to the uptown N train. She toed the yellow line, close to the edge, and stood there as the train came in, the scream of the wheels and the roar of air and engine obliterating thought for a grateful instant. Maybe a crazy person would push her and that would be it, but none did, and she let herself be jostled into the car by the crowd, exhausted and ashamed of these thoughts. She found a seat and gave it up immediately to an old man with a cane. She got the usual embarrassed smile from him, and the usual scowls or confused looks from the able-bodied in their seats. The faces around her seemed gargoylish, oozing sin, selfishness, cruelty. And was she different? Hardly. She would have committed murder, too, had she not been stopped by David.
Rising panic, a foul taste in her mouth, sweat cold on her forehead. The bodies pressed a
gainst her as the train swayed. She couldn’t bear it. The train stopped, and she squirmed out. Thirty-fourth Street. She stood on the platform, frozen in the moving mob. I’m losing my mind, she thought, this isn’t happening to me. The train pulled out. She heard music, a saxophone. She turned. A black man in a skullcap and a long, dirty raincoat was playing “Autumn Leaves,” a sweet, rich sound, amplified by the concrete vault of the subway. Across the tracks, on the downtown side, she saw a Chinese man kneel and open a violin case and begin to play the same song, in harmony, a spontaneous duet.
She listened, rapt, until the end of the song, then dropped a dollar into the horn man’s case and found that she could move again. One of the little city miracles. She left the subway with a lighter heart and went off to find David Grale. At Holy Redeemer, she found that he had been by the kitchen earlier and had gone off with the bike. This was a grocery man’s rig with a big hamper over the front wheel, which was used to bring supplies and food to people too debilitated or ornery to come in for services. One of the layworkers said that David was planning to cruise the yards. Lucy walked west and found the bike where she expected, leaning against a torn chain-link fence. She descended to the homeless village, where she found David and Benz half-dragging, half-carrying what looked like an enormous duffel bag, which, from the sound it made, must have been full of scrap metal. Lila Sue danced around them, flapping her hands in agitation. As Lucy came closer, she saw that it was not a duffel bag, but a man.
“It’s a balloon man, he fell from the upstairs tracks in the sky,” said Lila Sue helpfully. Lucy’s heart sank.
“Hi, Lucy,” said David. “Can you give us a hand here?”
“Oh, no, not another one!” she wailed.
“No, just old Jingles,” said Grale. “We found him down on the tracks. He’s comatose.”
“He’s comatose and his other toes are frozen,” said Lila. “It was too cold on the tracks in the sky, and the pain came through at once, puff puff, said the rain train. Let me tell you my story, Lucy.”
“Not right now, Lila,” said Lucy. She grabbed one of Jingles’s arms, Benz grabbed the other, and David heaved up the bottom half. Jingles, a person of complex ethnicity, was dressed in the usual multiple layers, the top one of which was an army field jacket of extraordinary filthiness. It was covered, as were the equally foul trousers, with dozens of small metal objects—pop tops, squashed cans, gears, fragments of automobiles thrown from street crashes, broken tools, parts from a TV, pieces of a toaster—necessary to keep the CIA from tracking him by means of the beacon they had implanted in his body. These accessories gave him his street name. As she carried, Lucy tried not to think about the grime under her hands, or the smell, a compound of wine stink, unwashed human, and something sharp, sweet, and chemical. Hideous, but one was not supposed to mind those things in the service of the afflicted. She tried (and failed) to imagine St. Catherine licking the sores of the lepers and for inspiration looked back at David, who gave her his angelic grin and said, “He sure stinks, doesn’t he? Wine and huffing glue, the famous death-wish cocktail. If Benz hadn’t’ve found him, he would’ve puked up and strangled in the vomit. And what a loss to the world that would be.”
“The boss of the world likes me,” said Lila Sue. “I bring her flowers and balloon pickles, and you know what?”
“What, honey?” said David. They were at the incline now, and David was supporting most of the dead weight.
“She has every color, even green and purple chocolate! Now I have a different story.”
“Later, Lila Sue,” Benz grunted as they lay Jingles down at the top of the slope. As they did so, the man jerked violently, and his face turned slaty blue while appalling noises issued from his mouth. Benz shrieked.
“Christ, he’s choking,” David cried. “Lucy! Benz! Flip him over. Pry his mouth open. Do it!”
They heaved Jingles over, slipping on the littered ground. David straddled the man, locked his hands under Jingles’s midriff, and heaved several times. Cringing, Lucy pried open Jingles’s clenched jaws and was rewarded by a spasmodic series of coughs and a gush of foul-smelling yellow fluid all over her hands.
Jingles coughed some more, shook, pissed on himself, and settled again into oblivious slumber, snoring. Lucy held her hands out in front of her like a zombie.
David laughed. “You should see your face, Lucy.”
“Oh, shut up! What am I supposed to do now?”
He put an arm around her shoulder. “It’s all part of the saint biz, kid. You’ll get used to it. Or you won’t. Meanwhile, I can only baptize you with water.”
He led her across the street and down an alley, where they found a standpipe and faucet without a handle. He took one from his jacket pocket and turned on the water. She washed her hands and dabbed with a handkerchief at the splatters on her skirt and stockings. She sank once more into shame.
“What are we going to do with Jingles?”
“Oh, I’ll get him over to the VA. They’ll keep him for a week until he dries out and then toss him back. And in a couple of weeks, if he doesn’t get hit by a car or fall asleep on the tracks, I’ll have to do it again. The poor ye have always with you. And the stupid, and the miserable, and the hopelessly damaged.”
“Why do you do it then?”
“Why? It’s my calling. And I don’t have many other skills.” He shut off the water, pocketed the handle. “Not like you, for example. Why do you do it? And why aren’t you in school?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems like the right thing to do, helping people. The middle-class life, you know, school and having stuff, and buying stuff . . . it gives me the willies sometimes. I want all of that”—she gestured widely, taking in the armies of the destitute of New York—“to go away. I want things to be different. So people like Jingles and Benz and Ali can have real lives. How much would it cost? And this city has so much money, it makes me sick, and it’s the poor old Church that has to take up the slack, people like you . . .” She stopped, embarrassed again. “I mean, it can’t go on, can it?”
“Oh, yeah. You’d be surprised what people can take and how long horrible things can go on. Meanwhile”—he jabbed a thumb in the direction they had come from—“this is paradise. Jingles’s life would be pure heaven to two-thirds of the people on the planet. We have to believe in ultimate mercy, you know.”
“Ultimate mercy? You mean grace?”
“I mean death.” He had for just a second that look on his face, the stranger she sometimes saw there, and then the lovely smile was back, and he said, “I tell you what—lend me your fancy cell phone, and I’ll get old Mr. J. picked up, and then I’ll run you across on my bike and we’ll distribute charity for a while, and then we’ll have lunch. I can tell you need cheering up, my little saintlet. Let’s see if we can’t generate a few moments of joy.”
Thinking of something, Karp called for Murrow and told him what to do. Murrow wrote it down with his small golden pencil in the little leather-bound notebook he always carried.
“Is that legal?” he asked.
“Barely. It’s also one of the large number of barely legal things you would not like known that you’ve done.”
“Check. Are you going to the big press conference?”
“I might drop by. I might stand in the back and sob because my words aren’t being taken down by newsies to decorate the Bloomingdale’s ads.”
“Yes, it’s sad. I assume this conference is to respond to McBright’s speech. What did you think of it?”
Karp picked a thin sheaf of paper from his cluttered desk and flipped through it casually. “An impassioned cry for justice. Unfortunate for Marshak that Desmondo Ramsey had a photogenic, middle-class, grieving family. Basically a decent kid with a few problems, not unlike yourself, Murrow. My daughter knew him slightly, as a matter of fact. Did you catch the reference in the Times to his juvie record?”
“Yeah. Character assassination of the victim. He was in on a stickup as a kid,
so, therefore, okay to blast him. But what you asked me to do . . . that’s on another case.”
“Yes, it is, but you notice McBright mentions Lomax, too, and also our old pal Jorell Benson, accused killer of a politically significant group member. The picture he’s painting is of a DA’s office that skews justice according to skin color and politics. A black guy gets shot, they give the white fellow that shot him a pass, just like they’re getting ready to give Sybil a pass. A black guy is accused of killing a white, they put him up for the death penalty.” Karp thumbed through the transcript pages. “Here’s a good part: ‘That beautiful lady Justice has a blindfold on. And the job of district attorney demands that her blindfold be tight across her eyes, so that skin color and class and how much money or political influence you have and whether you’re homeless or not doesn’t matter. But Jack Keegan has tugged that blindfold down so far you can’t call it Justice anymore. Another one of those little tugs, Jack, and we might as well call her Ms. Lynch.’ Pretty powerful stuff.”
“But untrue,” said Murrow in a tone tinged with hope.
Karp gave him a hard look, then smiled and tossed the transcript down. “Of course, untrue. And also somewhat true. In fact, Justice is unequal. It’s the case that almost everyone on death row in this country got there by killing white people. It’s the case that most black defendants are poor and are defended by public defenders with no resources and less than adequate time to prepare cases. It’s the case that the cops and us tend to pay more attention when a lowlife kills a citizen, black or white, than when a lowlife kills another lowlife, and it’s a fact that a really high proportion of mutts in this town are black or Hispanic. It’s the case that the system depends on those inequities, because if every accused felon we got in here could afford to mount a case like Sybil Marshak is going to mount, we would have to expand the courts and prosecutorial systems a hundredfold. But I also think that the inequities are the result of class and poverty. It used to be Irish, Jews, and Italians—now it’s blacks and Hispanics. There’s no specific racism involved here like there was in the Jim Crow South. Out on the street, with cops, it might be different, but not here. Okay, I’ll give you that if Benson had killed his cousin the crack dealer, we would not even be thinking about seeking death. On the other hand, given the vic, I think Roland would come down just as hard on Benson if Benson was a nice Jewish boy.” Karp grimaced. “Hell, harder probably, and his instinct is to cream Marshak, too. So, in that sense, McBright is demagoguing. There’s no . . .” Karp moved his hands, searched for a phrase.
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