“What’s he angry about?”
“The same stuff that gets everyone angry: hypocrisy, unfairness, stupidity, the way things don’t work, the bad guys winning all the time, injustice. Most people, they just see all that and they say ‘What’s on TV?’ or ‘Let’s get high,’ or have sex or whatever, but some people don’t, and some of them go crazy behind it. They can’t turn away, and they don’t believe in God, so they have no place to go but the street.”
“This is your theory of homelessness?”
“Oh, no. Most of them are nuts or dopers or drunks,” she said cheerfully. “God bless them. But some, like Canman, and Real Ali, and maybe David, they’re seekers. Saints in training or failed saints, you could say.”
“Is Canman the slasher?”
A shadow passed over her face, and she took a moment before answering. “He could be. I know he always carried a knife. I heard he cut a guy once who was trying to rip him off. And he makes bombs, booby traps, really to protect his stuff. I mean it’s the street. But I can’t believe it, not really.” She laughed. “Actually, he looks too good for it. It’s probably someone nobody would ever suspect.” Again, he saw that shadow cross her face.
“That’s not how it works in real life, though,” said Karp. “In real life, the guy who looks like he did it usually did do it. It looks to me like Detective Cooley chased Lomax and executed him because of some prior relationship that your Canman knows about. And, unfortunately, Canman is in the crosshairs as the slasher just now, which means if Cooley found him, he could just take him out, and all anybody’d do about it is give him another medal.”
“Provided the slashings stopped.”
“Yeah, but that’d be too late for Canman. I wish someone could get word to him, to get him to surface.”
“We’re working on that,” said Lucy. “He doesn’t trust the cops.”
“Who does? And what makes it a problem is this damn election. Jack’s gone batty on the subject—don’t rile the police, don’t rile the Jews, don’t rile the West Side Democrats, and so we’re throwing cases right and left. It’s like Italy or Guatemala down there.”
She patted his arm. “Poor Daddy! There’s nothing you can do?”
“You already asked me that. I have a nasty plan.”
“Oh, no! I thought you were the only one in the family without nasty plans.”
“Not anymore, obviously. There’s still Giancarlo; he’s pretty clean as far’s I know.”
“This is why you’ve been walking around with that long face lately?”
“Partly.”
“And Mom. What are we going to do about her?”
Karp got up and put the cups in the sink. “Watchful waiting. I’m hoping she’ll snap out of it, like she has before.”
“She needs to go into detox.”
“Thank you for the medical opinion. I tell you what, why don’t you let me worry about your mother, and you worry about staying in school. I think they’re serious this time. You flunk these midterms coming up, and you’re toast.”
“Don’t nag, Dad! I know this.”
“Well . . . ?”
“I’ll try,” she lied.
• • •
“I’m unhappy with this,” said Karp, frowning. “This is not what I wanted. And what about the watch?”
He said this to Mimi Vasquez and Gilbert Murrow. Murrow looked uncomfortable, and faintly embarrassed. Vasquez was angry. Her face was flushed and pouty. “You keep saying that, what about the watch, but it’s got no goddamn connection with the Marshak case. In fact, there is no Marshak case, as I just got finished telling you. We’ve interviewed over twenty of Ramsey’s known associates. We asked them about the knife. Answers: don’t know; yeah, he had one, but different; yeah, he had that one, if you say so and twenty bucks. Did he do angel dust? Yeah, all the time; no, never; yeah, if you say so and twenty bucks.”
“He didn’t use,” said Karp.
“Why, because your daughter says so? Paxton, who was a known intimate of the victim in this case, swears he used it all the time and got crazy and violent behind it. I would say he makes a more compelling witness than your daughter, who, if I can say so, tends to cast a more forgiving light over these characters than I do, or than a jury will, and I don’t even mention the fact that it takes me an hour to wash the stink out of my hair. Nobody we talked to ever saw him with the watch, except for the three guys who said he stole it from them and could they get it back. There is no, repeat, no known association between Marshak and either Ramsey or Paxton. Paxton sticks to his story about the knife and the attack like it was attached to his left testicle. And, yeah, it’s Ramsey’s prints on it. Bottom line? It’s a dead end.”
Karp seemed to ignore her tone and frustration and asked, “What did you say she was doing in the building?”
“Her insurance guy has his offices there. She was going to do some business with him and then drive out to her place upstate. That’s why she had her car. Perfectly innocent. She drove in there, did her business, returned to her car, he jumped her with the knife, she pulled her gun, shot him, panicked, got back in the car, and booked. End of story, an urban tragedy.”
“Or so we’re being led to believe.”
Vasquez banged her hand on the arm of her chair. “Jesus! Those are the facts, damn it! There is no case against her on those facts.” Her voice had risen to a shout. Karp stared at her, saying nothing. “Why are you obsessing about this goddamn case?”
“Because of the watch.”
“Oh, will you please shut up about the watch already! Who cares how he got the watch!”
“I care, and I’m the bureau chief, and don’t tell me to shut up in my own office, Ms. Vasquez.”
They stared at each other. No contest: Karp had the hardest stare in the building. Vasquez dropped her eyes.
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Karp. I’m sorry you’re not satisfied with my work.” She seemed about to burst into tears. Karp was not feeling that great himself. He had nurtured Vasquez almost from her first day in the office because he thought she was a good prosecutor, and because she reminded him of his wife as she once was, a handsome, scrappy, humorous, tough ethnic girl from a tough part of town. Also contributing to his discomfort: he had thought she liked him and had liked that. In fact, she had been in love with him for years, hopelessly and silently (not unusual among a certain stratum of female attorneys around the place), a kind of office joke that everyone knew about except Karp, which made it funnier. Karp felt hurt and betrayed: Why couldn’t she see the point? Vasquez felt abused: Why was he torturing her with this craziness?
At this point, into the strained silence entered the ever tactful Murrow, reading out of his tiny notebook. “Lady Rolex, chronometer, fourteen-K gold with diamond bezel and gold expansion band, serial number zero one seven eight five zero nine two, reading one oh six when logged in, reported stolen from NPK Bonded Warehouse at JFK last August, along with a bunch of other stuff, mainly watches, optics, and perfume. The cop I spoke with, a Lieutenant Robert Maguire, says they suspect that whoever did the theft is fencing the stuff out through a ring run by Augustine Albert Firmo, but have been unable to nail down a case. Firmo seems wise to the usual stings.” Murrow looked up from the notebook. “Does that help?”
“I don’t know,” said Karp. “Is there a connection between Marshak and Firmo? Between Ramsey or Paxton and him?”
Murrow said, “Between a big-time fence and a street guy? Why would there be? Street guys usually sell fake Rolexes.”
Vasquez shoved her notes roughly into a cardboard folder. “This is ridiculous. What does it matter? You think Sybil Marshak ordered a hot Rolex and killed Ramsey because she didn’t like the way it looked on her wrist? You might as well look at their horoscopes.”
“Calm down, Vasquez,” said Karp.
“No!” She stood up, bristling. “I don’t understand any of this. Christ, Butch, it’s you who’s always saying don’t speculate, stick with the facts, can you m
ake a case or not, and if not, forget it. And there’s no case here, and you’re speculating like crazy, like you’re on some kind of vendetta against this woman. Or against her lawyer. I don’t want any part of it. It’s weird and it’s . . . sick.”
“Thank you, Mimi,” said Karp stiffly. “I’ll tell Tony you’re back on the chart. Just leave your notes with Murrow.” She stared at him for a couple of long seconds, then turned on her heel and left.
Karp leaned back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. “Take a lesson from that, Murrow,” he said wearily. “The key to this job is skillful management of people.”
“You had her in the palm of your hand. It was masterful.”
“Yeah, right. Yet another friend down the toilet. You think I’m crazy, too, don’t you?”
“Not as such. But I also see her point. I’m also thinking, what if it wasn’t his watch? That would cut into your objection about his motivation for his run at Marshak.”
“Wasn’t his watch? Whose watch was it then?”
“He could’ve been holding it for someone, transporting it. Maybe someone the cops had their eye on, who didn’t want to get caught with it on him. Say this guy uses street people to mule stuff around. Ramsey was something of a hustler. He could’ve done favors like that for a commission.”
“Yeah.” Swiveling in his chair, Karp turned his attention to the window, where a greasy rain was falling. Something was nagging at his mind, a connection he ought to be making, something about street people and thieves, but he wasn’t making it. And there was something else, too, a name. He thought hard, but couldn’t come up with it. It was like that a lot lately, as if part of his mind was locked up with some complex problem, leaving free about as much processing power as a pocket calculator deployed. He was making mistakes, not seeing stuff, screwing up with people. And he knew very well what the drain was. He felt Murrow’s eyes on him, the pressure of his waiting. He swiveled back. “When was the watch logged in as evidence?”
Murrow consulted his papers. “The twenty-eighth at six-eighteen P.M. Why?”
“Oh, no reason, really. It showed the wrong time though. Look, Murrow, I got to give this some more thought. You’re right, that’s a good idea, maybe he was a mule. Okay, let’s let Marshak hang for a while. Go and find this Maguire again, ask him to give you a list of Firmo’s known associates. Maybe that’ll jog something.”
Murrow nodded and wrote a note, looking doubtful. The intercom buzzed. Murrow left and Collins came in.
“I want to thank you,” said Karp when the young man had seated himself. “I had an interesting conversation with McBright on Sunday.”
“He’s a smart guy.”
“He is, and remarkably well-informed about what’s going on in this office. Remarkably.”
Karp paused to let that sink in. He was not going to confront Collins about the leakage just yet, but he wanted him to be in no doubt that Karp knew what was going on. And a leak could be convenient, to disseminate both truth and things not necessarily true but which it might be convenient to have known. “In any case, we had a frank exchange of views about some racially tinged cases. Of which Benson is one. I take it you’ve seen the alibi witnesses, so-called?”
Collins opened a notebook. “Yes, I did. Yolanda Benson, forty-one, and Darcy Benson, nineteen, mother and sister. These are decent people, by the way. The mom’s a teacher’s aide, the sister’s a student at Fashion. The father’s an electrician, divorced a long time, but he comes by and helps out. I took the original Q&A and went through the questions again. This was in their home on West One Hundred Thirty-third Street. According to them, on the evening of, Jorell came in just after five because he wanted to watch the Holy Cross–Syracuse game on TV. Jorell is apparently a big college-ball fan, and he had a bet down. He had Syracuse and five points.”
“They remembered this?”
“Yes, adamantly. They said it was a close game, and Jorell was jumping off the couch and yelling at the TV. They were eating dinner in front of the TV, and Jorell was so excited he hardly ate anything, and they were having barbecue pork chops, apparently a favorite of his. Anyway, Syracuse won by seven, and Jorell was pumped. He said he was going out to collect his bet and left around seven, returning after midnight. The murder went down at a little past six, so that’s a stone alibi, if you believe them.”
“And do you?”
“Wait, there’s more. I reinterviewed Alicia Wallis, the girlfriend. Sixteen, but going on thirty. She says that on the afternoon prior to the killing Jorell told her he was going to hit a, quote, Jew diamond guy, unquote, that evening on the subway, that he had the knife and everything. Afterwards, he came to her mother’s apartment, around seven, all excited and showed her the diamonds and asked her to keep them for him. Which she did. Two days later, Jorell came back, picked up some of the stones, and tried to sell them in the district and got caught. The cops visited her, and she first lied for him, and then she says she got scared because the guy had been killed, and she wasn’t about to mess with no murder charge, and she told all. Now, back to the sister. The sister says that Alicia Wallis is a lying little street tramp, and she, Darcy, has been trying to get her brother to dump her for months. Darcy says that Alicia’s been balling Oscar Simms since forever, and everyone in the ’hood knows it except for her dumb-ass brother, and if you want to know who stabbed that guy, you could do worse than look at old Oscar.”
“And did you look?”
“Oh, yeah. It turns out that the police had looked, too. Oscar’s an alumnus of Greenhaven, three years for armed robbery and two other arrests for robbery, dropped to larceny and time served in jail. Oscar has an alibi, too, supplied by a couple of homies, Duane Morgan and Tyrone Apger, also with sheets on them. A pretty tough crew, by the way, with a history of going after the black hats.”
Karp voiced a couple of dramatic chords.
“You got it. They were watching a kung fu movie at the Academy, which is downtown, not too far from the murder scene.”
“What kung fu movie?” asked Karp.
“Funny you should ask, because Oscar doesn’t recall. ‘All those movies be the same, man.’ No knife on Oscar either, or any physical evidence, but my sense, after talking to Thornberry, the detective who closed, is that the cops didn’t look all that hard after they had Benson. Benson looked good to go. The stones, Deng’s eyewitness, and Alicia’s story—three strikes and he’s out.”
“We got Deng to look at Oscar?”
“In a six-pack photo, against Benson and four dummies. He picked Benson.”
“Wait a second— after he had already ID’d Benson live?”
“How did you guess?” said Collins. “Naturally, he focused on the guy he’d already identified. So, basically, if we look at it from the defense’s point of view, which you’re always lecturing us we should do, the case sits on the possession of part of the loot, a totally fucked ID process, and the testimony of a teenaged accessory after the fact who’s screwing the guy who probably did it.”
“How does Benson explain the loot?”
“Oh, you’ll love this. He says he did it as a favor to Alicia. She told him she found them in a trash can, and she didn’t think they were worth much, but could he maybe find out for her. Jorell is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier.”
“Can we refocus on Oscar?”
“Maybe over Pat Thornberry’s dead body. I’m telling you, the cops are not going to be helpful on this without a big circle jerk involving the eighth floor here and the twelfth floor over at One PP. Also, assuming we have the cops lined up, what do we have on him? No physical evidence, his homies are standing up right now, Alicia is solid for the time being.”
“The time being . . .” mused Karp.
Collins nodded. “Yeah, my thoughts exactly. If he’s really the guy on this, then Oscar needs to keep Alicia and his pals real happy indefinitely, and Oscar did not strike me as a fellow with the kind of self-control and long-term view that would ma
ke that work.”
“You’re probably right. Sooner or later one of these people is going to want a favor from us, and if someone asks the right questions, the whole thing will come unglued.”
“So what do we do?”
“Interesting question, especially now. I think I’ll ask the district attorney. He likes to keep decisions like this in his own hands. Meanwhile, good work. I’ll probably be working for you if McBright gets in there.”
“A racist remark, I believe,” said Collins.
“See? My horrible reputation is well deserved.”
Collins laughed and made his exit.
Karp got a chance to present these findings to the DA earlier than he had anticipated, for shortly after Collins left he got a peremptory call from Keegan, personally, telling him to get in there right away. He walked up the two flights.
Keegan was there with Fuller, which stifled the tiny hope that Karp always kept alive that Jack would return to his real, or noncandidate, persona and that they could then discuss the legal affairs of the office like menches, as they used to. Karp nodded to both of them and sat down.
“What’s this I hear about you sending someone to screw up the Benson case?” demanded Keegan without preamble.
“I wouldn’t say screwing up. I would say familiarizing myself with a top-priority case that I’m going to have to prosecute one of these days. And it’s a good thing I did, Jack, because there’s a lot more to Benson than meets the eye.”
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