Enemy Within

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  The cell phone buzzed just then, and she answered it, relieved to be out of the coils of racing thought. It was Wayne Segovia.

  “Marlene? I’m down at the Daumier. It could be we got a situation here.”

  “The Daumier?” She was still a little narcotized by mammon.

  “Yeah, Kelsie Solette’s place. I got a call from Donny Walker. He thinks he spotted Jimmy Coleman cruising the street. Saw him a couple of times. What do you think?”

  “Stay there, I’ll come by.” She checked outside. “I’m at Third and Forty-sixth. I should be there in ten minutes.”

  She gave the cabbie the new address. Donny Walker was a kid they had put on the staff of Kelsie Solette’s building, in the reasonable expectation that a short jolt in Rikers was not going to dissuade the stalker Jimmy Coleman from his heartfelt vow to make Solette his own or, failing that, kill her and himself. People like Coleman represented the most difficult challenge in the celebrity-protection business. The law couldn’t touch them beyond petty sentences for harassment, which typically only solidified their determination. The only way around this was to nail the guy on a major felony, without endangering the client at the same time. That, or shoot him, one; but Marlene didn’t do that anymore. She felt her brain slide into a different mode as adrenaline cleared the stupid monologues from her mind like a stiff breeze blowing through a smoked-up kitchen. Ah, action!

  It had taken Karp the better part of a week to get his homicide chops back. Roland had vanished without a word to anyone—no farewell party, no parting gift from the loyal staff. Karp had called once and left a message on the machine at Roland’s place, and so far no reply. He was secretly relieved. He was also relieved to find that Roland had run a fairly tight ship. The people were reasonably competent, the records were in order. The ship was somewhat tighter than Karp would have liked. Roland was the kind of administrator who kept everything flowing through his fingers and ruled by yelling, which meant that the staff tended to keep mistakes to themselves and hesitated to seek guidance. Karp made no major changes in procedures, but met individually with each of the thirty-odd staff members, assured them of his continuing confidence, received a rundown on their caseloads, made some gentle suggestions, and in general attempted to suggest to them that he was not one to bite their heads off if they goofed. Which they would. Tony Harris was Roland’s deputy, which was good; Karp had known Harris from his first day on the job, had trained him, and trusted him. He made it clear that Harris would handle the day-to-day running of the bureau, while Karp focused on the big-ticket items, Benson and Marshak. And Lomax, but Karp did not mention that to Harris.

  The homicide bureau chief’s office was a little smaller than the one he’d occupied up on the eighth floor, and more crowded, with a desk at one end, a glass-topped conference table in the middle, a worn and cracked green leather couch along one wall, and the rest so occupied by bookcases and filing cabinets that a normal person had to navigate by walking sideways. The paint was yellowing and dirty, as were the windows. No young law school graduate going private would have tolerated such conditions for a minute, but Karp and his colleagues in the courthouse were used to it, and to the notion that public officials were obliged by their choice of profession and its critical importance to the commonwealth to work in squalor.

  Two people were sitting on the couch at the moment. One was Terrell Collins, a tall, caramel-colored, crop-headed man wearing hornrims, a gray suit, and glistening Florsheims. The other was a broad-shouldered young woman wearing an olive suit with a white silk T-shirt beneath it. She had bold indio features and a mass of thick black hair: Mimi Vasquez. Both Vasquez and Collins shared some history with Karp, and as a result of it were slightly nervous with him, or rather expectantly concerned. Collins had second-seated Karp on a notorious trial, the same one whose loss had lost Karp his original job as homicide bureau chief. Vasquez had prosecuted a teenaged infanticidal mom a couple of years back, in which Karp had involved himself in a way that, while serving Karp’s idea of justice, had cut Vasquez out of the real action. Both of these people had no doubts about Karp’s basic integrity or competence, but they both considered that working closely with him could, under the right conditions, be like accepting a copilot’s berth on a kamikaze bomber.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here,” said Karp in a mock-portentous voice. They both laughed. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get the DA out of the jam he has gotten himself in because of this goddamn election, and by so doing serve justice, God, the people, and our precious American way of life. Whaddya say, kids?”

  “Will it take long?” asked Collins innocently. “I have a dentist’s appointment.”

  Vasquez said, “That was incredibly inspiring, Butch. I want to say that I’m behind you all the way, or until it becomes personally inconvenient.”

  “Gosh, you guys!” said Karp. “I’m deeply touched. Let me pause and wipe away the tears.” He clapped his hands smartly. “All right! We have two cases, both politically hot. Whichever way they go, they are each going to piss off an important constituency that the DA needs to get elected. The DA told me to fix them, and I intend to fix them. I have a suspicion that what the DA means by fix, whether or not he knows it himself, has to do with figuring out what the maximum political advantage is and then crafting our cases to make that happen. But this is not what I intend to do.” He paused to let that sink in.

  “My own feeling,” he resumed, “is that the DA is mistaken, and that skewing cases in this way is a disastrous strategy because the office of DA is different from a general political office. The mayor and the governor have to balance competing goods, and if the goods they support have more beneficiaries than the goods they don’t support, then they stay elected, and if not, not. But that’s their job, that’s what they’re for. But we don’t have competing goods, or anyway we shouldn’t. We have the law; we have procedure; we have skill and judgment. We know what a good case looks like. And so I propose that the best politics is to just go by what’s carved in stone on the outside of the building: ‘Every place is safe to him who lives in justice—be just and fear not.’”

  They stared at him. After a short pause, Collins asked, “Are you serious?”

  “Damn right I am.”

  Vasquez said, “Um, Butch, that’s very idealistic, but . . .”

  “No! It’s not idealistic. In this case, it’s pragmatic as hell. Look, Vasquez, as soon as we start thinking directly about political consequences, we get lost in a tangle we can’t get out of, which is not the case in plain-vanilla politics. The side that loses the election might feel sorry for itself, it might have to pay more taxes or get less services, but it doesn’t feel betrayed. If the losers were actually right about policy, sooner or later things will get worse and they’ll win the next time out. Rah-rah, democracy in action. But here, if we screw around with a prosecution, it is a betrayal, and people will see that, and they won’t forgive Jack Keegan for it, and all the political influence in the world won’t save him. I’m not sure he realizes that, but I do, and that’s how we’re going to proceed in both these matters.”

  “Shit, man,” said Collins, “we have to be honest now?”

  “I’m game,” said Vasquez. “It’ll be a refreshing change. What do you want us to do?”

  Karp could see that she wasn’t letting herself believe him, but at least she was peeping over the wall of cynicism all these young attorneys erected after a few months on the job. He smiled encouragingly. “Good. You have Marshak. Raney’s the cop on it, a very bright guy, inclined to be helpful. Go see him, get involved. I know they don’t like us hanging close to them, and usually we don’t have the time, but we’re going to free you both up of everything else you have for the duration of these two cases. Push him to find the other guy, if any. Check out the vic. Talk to the people he hung with. We want to try to reconstruct his last day. Most important, did he pack a knife, did anyone ever see him with a knife? And the watch
. Where did it come from, where did a homeless guy get a highend Rolex watch? There’s a story there; find out what it was. On the Marshak end, what was she doing in that garage? You need to talk to my wife on that. And my daughter.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, the accused was a client, or almost a client, of my wife’s. She thought she was being stalked. In any case, it happens that Marlene was at the vicinity of the crime at or near the time of. She saw Marshak make her getaway. Also, people who knew her in the weeks before it went down, what was her general behavior, her morale? Most important—did she know the victim, any connection whatsoever? Raney will help you out.”

  “You said your daughter?”

  “Oh, yeah. Lucy helps run a soup kitchen down in Chelsea. Ramsey was one of the regulars. She can give you background on him and his homies. Along with that, see his family, get a sense of what the guy was like. Details, Vasquez, it’s all details. Bring ’em in, the more the better.” She nodded, scribbled on a yellow pad. He pointed a big finger at her. “Every day on this, okay?”

  “Got it.” She seemed a little brighter now, energized. “I have an appearance in ten minutes.”

  “Okay, go. See Tony about getting out from under everything else. See you tomorrow.”

  Karp turned to Collins. “You—you have a much harder problem because you have a case that’s supposedly made already. Basically, I want you to remake it.”

  “Remake it,” said Collins neutrally.

  “Yeah. Let’s face it, Jack is going to ask for death on this one, absent any serious flaw in the case. Everybody is out for this kid’s blood. The crime is tailor-made to appeal to everyone’s New York violence fantasies. Black criminal kills respectable white family man in the subway for money. We are bound and determined to kill the guy who did it.”

  “It’s the law.”

  Karp nodded impatiently. “Yeah, I know it’s the law. And I know we can probably convict him. That’s not the point. Unlike the chief justice of the Supreme Court, I happen to still believe that actual innocence is an exculpatory fact. I need you to convince me that Jorell Benson stabbed Moishe Fagelman to death on the M line, me, not a bunch of retirees and high school graduates who want to get home to their families.”

  “I don’t get it. What is it about the case that you find unconvincing?”

  “A bunch of stuff. Benson was a strong-arm mugger, a chain snatcher, a knock-down-women-and-take-their-bags artist. Why did he decide to go with a knife? And, by the way, where’s the knife? Two, it’s a big jump from petty mugging to hitting a diamond merchant. He had to know the guy was carrying diamonds, and what he was carrying them in. It was, you’ll recall, a little leather pouch. The perp took only that. Benson is a sixth-grade dropout with a seventy-two IQ. Is it credible that he could put a hit like that together and then not know that every diamond merchant in the city would be looking for just those stones, and then come waltzing into some booth in the diamond district and try to sell them? Three, our eyewitness, Walter Deng, ID’s Benson from inside his token booth as the man who supposedly ran by on his way out. I’ll stick you in a token booth, and I’ll run by, and I guarantee you won’t be able to tell me from Joe Pesci.”

  “Deng picked him out of a lineup.”

  “Right, which means he picked one out of six. Sorry, but I don’t feel comfortable killing Mr. Benson for rolling snake eyes. Finally”—Karp took a deep breath—“finally, Terrell, the guy has an alibi. He was home with his mother, his sister, and her two kids when the crime went down. They were watching a basketball game.”

  Collins shrugged. “Relatives lie to protect their families.”

  “Uh-huh, but did these? Let me ask you a question? You have any brothers or sisters?”

  “One of each. Why?”

  “I have two brothers. If one of them was accused of committing a violent murder for gain, and he came to me and said, ‘Tell a lie, give me an alibi,’ I wouldn’t. Would you?”

  Collins thought for a moment. “Maybe I would.”

  “Oh, bullshit! Perjure yourself, put everything you’ve worked for at risk? Because your brother wanted a little extra cash and killed someone to get it? Come on!”

  “Okay, I take your point. I’ll go over the case. But the cops . . . Jesus, they’re going to hate me for this.”

  This was Roland’s influence, thought Karp, his one great flaw as a prosecutor, his desire to stay palsy with the cops. “Fuck ’em, then,” Karp snarled. “They’re supposed to hate you. You want cops to love you, join the Police Athletic League.”

  They discussed some reporting details, and then Collins rose to go. Karp made a restraining gesture. “One other thing. You know Lucius McBright, don’t you?”

  Collins’s face took on a suspicious cast. “Why would you think that?”

  “Because you’re politically active, and ambitious, and live in his district, and attend the same church where he’s a deacon.”

  A nervous smile. “You’ve been following me around?”

  “No, your address and church affiliation are in your personnel records. I’m a trained investigator, remember?”

  Collins laughed, relieving some of the tension. “I guess. As a matter of fact, I do know him. Not well, but we’ve talked some. Why?”

  “I want to meet him.”

  “Call his office. He’s a public official.”

  “I don’t mean that way. I want to converse with him informally. If you could set it up, I’d consider it a personal favor.”

  Collins nodded. “Sure. I’ll see what I can do.” He left. Toward the end of the day, he called Karp and said, “The man said, come to church this Sunday.”

  “Church, huh? No problem; thanks, Terrell. He’ll find me?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Collins laughed. “You’ll be easy to spot.”

  • • •

  Wayne Segovia was waiting in his car, a tan Nissan this time, parked in a bus zone on Fifth, across the street and a few dozen yards uptown from the entrance to the Daumier. Donny Walker, a muscular, young black man, was in the backseat, dressed in a brown handyman’s coverall with the building name and DON embroidered in the breast. Marlene got into the passenger seat.

  “What’s up, guys?”

  “I spotted him when I was taking out some junk from the service entrance,” said Walker. “He cruised by up Fifty-eighth, real slow and turned onto Fifth. I stayed where I was, and then he came by again, same thing. A Honda, light blue, New York plates.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Absolutely. Glasses, the blond hair, no chin. He was driving real slow, so I got a good look.”

  “Okay. You get his plates?”

  Walker spoke a number, and Marlene wrote it down. “I’ll call this in to the cops. He’s in violation, coming this close to her building. I can get him revoked. Good work, Donny.”

  The man grinned. “If they snatch him up, can I drop this janitor act?”

  “You could be a doorman,” said Segovia.

  “Really? Gosh, my boyhood dream. A uniform with gold on it! Marlene, tell me I’m not dreaming!”

  “The fact is, we need to get you closer to that stupid woman than a doorman,” said Marlene. “I should take another run at her now that old Jimmy’s started coming close. She might be more inclined to listen.” Marlene smiled at Walker. “Can you be a rock musician? For Tainted Patties you just need the three chords and some attitude.”

  “I’d rather hump ash cans,” said Walker.

  Marlene called the complaint in to the Nineteenth Precinct, and they all waited, talking companionably. Shop talk at first, idiots I have guarded, the freakiness of celebrity and its discontents. The talk grew more personal. Segovia passed around a pack of snapshots of his family, a pretty wife and a fourteen-month-old, a rottweiler he was training. Marlene liked this. She enjoyed the company of her troops more than she did that of the Osborne executives with whom she spent most of her time. The troops were very much of a type, these men and the few
women in the trade, physical creatures, impatient with routine, bright but without much academic talent, rebellious under bureaucratic controls. The part of her that had never really integrated with the dutiful and brilliant student, the dutiful and loving mom, blossomed among them.