Reversible Error Read online

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you, and don’t act so surprised. Who else is there? You’ve got a solid reputation in the criminal-law community, a splendid record as bureau chief—and you’ve never lost a murder case. For God’s sake, man, you’ve actually been wounded in the line of duty! You’re a natural!”

  Karp felt his stomach rolling. “But I’ve never been involved in politics …” he protested lamely.

  “Nonsense! Who organized Phil Garrahy’s last campaign? And besides, that’s all to the good. So you’re not a pol! We’ve had enough of political wheeler-dealing in that office. We need somebody reliable, professional, tough as nails. I’m telling you, as sure as we’re sitting here, you can have it if you want it. But you’ve got to know you want it, Butch.” Reedy’s sharp blue eyes locked in on Karp as he said, “Do you want it?”

  As from a long distance away, Karp heard his own voice say, “I want it.”

  Tecumseh Booth came easily out of the light sleep favored, of necessity, by the incarcerated, to find a familiar figure in his cell. The cell was in a precinct station in Harlem, and Booth had been there for nearly three days. This was unusual, but then there had been nothing usual about this arrest. He was also alone in his cell, which was even stranger. Precinct pens were ordinarily standing-room-only until they were cleaned out each morning by the zone wagons that circulated around Manahattan, picking up prisoners and bringing them to Centre Street for arraignment.

  “About time you showed up,” said Booth sulkily. “S’pose to get a goddamn trial before they lock you up for life.”

  The shooter said, “How about keeping your voice down? Look, I hear you been doing good. I want you to know we appreciate it.”

  “Yeah? You got a funny way of showing it, man. When the fuck am I getting out of this shithole?”

  “Soon. I can’t just come in here and sign you out. You’re gonna have to go to an arraignment.”

  Booth stood up and said angrily, “Fuck arraignment, man! That wasn’t in the damn deal. I’m s’pose to be covered, and now you tell me my black ass is hanging out of the blanket? What the hell happens if I get bound over, man? I’m looking at six months in Rikers, if they want a trial, even if I beat it. No way, motherfucker! I stood up once, and I’ll stand up again, but not on this shit. It don’t work that way; you hump for the Man, you don’t see no jail.”

  “Relax, will you!” said the shooter, looking nervously over his shoulder. “The fix is in. You go up to court tomorrow, and you’ll be walking by lunchtime. I guarantee. Just keep your cool.”

  Booth sank down again on his bunk. “I better be walking,” he said. “I go up on this, and they gonna put you under the jail.”

  Detectives Lanny Maus of the King Cole Trio and Dick Manning of the new drug lord task force sat near the back of Part 10 waiting for the arraignment of Tecumseh Booth. Maus was there because he was the arresting officer and because Dugman had told him to keep track of what happened to their only suspect. Manning was there because he was handling the cop end for the drug task force.

  The two men knew one another slightly, and conversed in a desultory manner while the boredom washed over them from the front of the courtroom. After fifty minutes the door to the pens opened and a gang of a dozen prisoners straggled in, one of whom was Booth.

  “We’re on,” said Manning.

  “Tecumseh’s looking well,” responded Maus.

  “I don’t care how well he looks as long as we get him nailed down. Hey, who’s the kid D.A.?”

  The court officer had called, “Two-seven-seven-one, Booth,” and Tecumseh had risen together with his Legal Aid attorney and a tall, very young assistant district attorney.

  Manning shrugged and shook his head. “I never saw him before. I thought the D.A.’s guy on all these cases was supposed to be what’s-his-name—the weight-lifter, Hrcany. This guy looks about fifteen. I hope he knows what the fuck he’s doing.”

  The judge, a beetle-browed red-faced man named Nolan, looked over the case file before him. He appeared unhappy with what he read there.

  “Are the People aware that this defendant has been incarcerated for more than seventy-two hours? Mr. Whatever-your-name-is, I’m talking to you.”

  “Uh … Schick, your Honor,” said Peter Schick, riffling through the file and trying to make sense of the arrest report. Karp had called him five minutes ago to tell him that one of the drug-lord cases he was supposed to look out for was coming up that morning. The judge repeated the question. Sweating and distraught, Schick blurted out, “No, your Honor … I mean, yes, he has.”

  “Good, then are the People ready for a preliminary hearing or presentation to the grand jury within twenty-four hours?”

  “Ahhh …”

  In the back, Lanny Maus pounded a fist into his thigh. Between his teeth he whispered, “Schmuck! Say yes! Say yes!” Manning rolled his eyes.

  “Mr. Schick, are you familiar with the seventy-two-hour rule?” asked the judge with a tone of menace.

  “Ah, I think so, your Honor,” said Schick.

  “You think so,” said Nolan. “So may I assume that since the defendant has been in jail these past seventy-two hours the People have prepared a presentation to the grand jury today?”

  “I’m … I’m not aware of that, your Honor.”

  “You’re wasting my time,” snapped Nolan, and then, addressing the Legal Aid lawyer, asked whether the defendant had community ties.

  The Legal Aid, who was as surprised as anyone by this turn of events, said, “He has a mother, your Honor.”

  “Mother is OK,” replied the judge. “Release on recognizance. Barney, give us a new court date. Next case.”

  “Two-eight-six-six-one, Maldonado,” said the court officer.

  Maus stood up. “Look at that asshole D.A.! He’s still standing there. He still doesn’t know what hit him. ROR for a murder—our fucking only lead! I can’t believe it!”

  Manning said sympathetically, “Hey it happens. Nolan runs a tight ship and the D.A. had this baby in there. Look, I could use some coffee. Let’s sit down and see where we go from here. We should work together on this.”

  The two cops stomped out. Still stunned, Peter Schick gathered his papers and drifted out into the hall. He went in the twelfth-floor men’s room and washed his face and combed his hair. Then he went down to the bureau office and braced himself for one of Karp’s infamous reamings.

  Which, in the event, he did not receive. Karp listened calmly to his embarrassed narrative and briefly pointed out what he had done wrong, including the admonition that certain questions from judges were always to be answered with the word “yes.”

  Then he seemed to drift into thought, leaning back in the big chair and rocking gently. Schick listened to the chair squeak for several long minutes.

  “It’s odd, though,” said Karp at last.

  “What is?”

  “Judge Nolan. Mealy Nolan, as we call him. A well-connected man, a political man, a man not above doing little favors for other well-connected people. But not, until today, widely known as a strong advocate of due process, especially not where black street criminals are concerned. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  “So what does it mean?” asked Schick.

  “Oh, nothing much,” said Karp lightly. “Just another little ripple on the great cesspool of justice.”

  But, in fact, Karp thought it meant a great deal. Somebody had put the arm on Nolan to walk Tecumseh. Was it the chief of detectives? A possible; the chief wanted the thing handled out of the courts, but would he have gone to a slimeball like Nolan to do the job? Not really, and why would he have had to? He could have quietly slipped Booth out of police jurisdiction anytime in the last three days.

  No, there was something else going on. Somebody with enough clout to roll a judge had wanted Tecumseh Booth out walking the streets. Did the rogue cops, whoever they were, therefore have something on Nolan? Another possible.

  But now there began to intrude int
o Karp’s mind a third possibility, even more disturbing. Suborning a judge was not exactly the style of a crazed vigilante killer. Maybe Nolan was in it out of conviction. Maybe there were others. People, even quite decent people, could do some strange and nasty things when convinced that they were right. The possibility of a truly massive conspiracy to wipe out the drug trade outside the constraints of the law darted like a giant, filthy cockroach across the surface of his mind. Who was involved? He thought of Denton, of Fulton.

  Of Guatemala.

  EIGHT

  The voice on the phone was pleasant, but only vaguely familiar. “Hi! This is Cliff Elliot. Is this Ellen Wagner?”

  Ellen Wagner responded with a hesitant “Yes?”

  The voice sounded amused. “You don’t remember me? Cliff? From Cheetah’s last Saturday night?”

  “Oh, Cliff!” she exclaimed after the briefest pause. One met so many men in the bars. Ellen Wagner was a secretary-receptionist in the president’s office of a large insurance firm. She had a boyfriend, of sorts, but in that era, the last when a single wage earner could afford to live alone in a Manhattan apartment, and the last when sex with strangers was more like romance than like Russian roulette, Ellen was not ready to, as she put it, “make a commitment.”

  The boyfriend was all right, for an insurance executive, steady and dependable, but in the night, in the city, the possibilities were infinite. She was good-looking: neck-length dark hair worn in a frizzed style that framed her round face and delicate, even features, and a small but well-proportioned body. She was twenty-six; there was still time for the unexpected. Anyone could walk into one of the bars, on any night, and see her, and whisk her away to the land of dreams.

  She tried to bring Cliff’s face to mind. Crinkly blond hair, smiling blue eyes. Gold jewelry, she remembered that. Good shoulders—he was wearing … ?

  “You were wearing the tight white jeans, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, you were drinking daiquiris,” he replied. “I couldn’t stop looking at you. Are you still pretty?”

  She laughed and said, “I guess so. So … Cliff. What’s going on?”

  “Well, I thought I’d call and see if you were doing anything later on.”

  “Oooh,” she sighed, her disappointment nearly genuine. “I have a date in like an hour. How bum!”

  “Oh, that’s OK. The thing is … remember we talked about how we both liked Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and I said I had outtakes from where I work—the record studio?—and I thought that since I was in the neighborhood …”

  “You want to come up now? Where are you?”

  A nervous laugh. “Well, actually, I’m right across the street. In the phone booth.”

  Cute, she thought, calling from across the street. It was thrilly and flattering, not the kind of thing an insurance junior executive would ordinarily do. Like in a movie.

  “Just a minute,” she said, and put the phone down. She skipped out to the hallway and looked out the hallway window. Her apartment faced the air shaft and this was the only way she could see out to Third Avenue. It was near dusk, a late Saturday afternoon, but she could see the figure in the phone booth three stories down. It was the guy.

  She went back to her place and looked around. Reasonably neat. She picked up a skirt she had been hemming, threw it on a chair in the bedroom, and closed the door. She checked herself in the mirror in the living room, ran a brush through her hair, and tucked her shirt into her jeans. Then she picked up the phone.

  “Come on up, then,” she said. “But just for a little while.”

  When Art Dugman was angry he clenched his jaw so tightly that little round bunches of muscles, like grapes, stood out against his jawline, and thick veins popped out on his temples. In the Twenty-eighth Precinct they said that from the size of the veins you could estimate the degree of anger. To Lanny Maus they looked like firehoses ready to burst.

  “Take it easy, Art,” he said placatingly. “It ain’t the end of the world.”

  “Boy, you don’t know what the fuck you talk-in about,” Dugman shouted. “They treatin us like fools! How long you think we gonna last out there if the word get around we been fucked up the ass like this?”

  “What’re you talking about, fucked up the ass? The D.A.’s the one screwed up—they had a kid in there didn’t know shit from Shinola …”

  Dugman gave him a baleful stare. “The fix is in. It was set up.”

  “Wha-a-a-t! You saying the D.A.’s bent, and the judge too?”

  “I don’t know about the D.A., but if the score was tied with seconds left, and the coach pulled out Dr. J. and put in some kid who never shot a basket in his life, you probably might want to see if he was talking to bookies. The judge? Fuckin Nolan’s been on the wire longer than Western Union. If it wasn’t fixed, grits ain’t groceries and Mona Lisa was a man.”

  From the corner of the squad room where he habitually sat, leaning his chair against the wall in the space between two filing cabinets, Jeffers asked, “If you right, why’d they spring him? He wasn’t doin any talking.”

  “Why?” replied Dugman. “Why you think? This big, my man, real big, and real dark. We got serious players involved here. Sure, he wasn’t talking, but then, he never been up on no murder charge either. They can’t take that chance.”

  “Somebody’s gonna hit him,” said Maus.

  “Now you detectin, baby!” Jeffers exclaimed. “You cookin good!”

  “Fuck you, Mack,” said Maus. Then to Dugman: “We gonna pick him up? Where’s he gonna go?”

  “Where you think?” Dugman snarled. “He ain’t got but one place to run. His momma.”

  Ellen Wagner opened a beer for her guest and a Diet Pepsi for herself. They listened to the tape. Cliff seemed more nervous than she remembered him being, as if he were waiting for something to happen. When the tape ran out, Cliff rose to his feet to retrieve it. He slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.

  “That was great,” she said. “Can’t I keep it? Or make a copy?”

  “No can do: I’d get in trouble if they even knew I had it,” he said apologetically. “Sorry.”

  “Oh,” she said, beginning to get irritated. She didn’t need two cautious guys in one day. She rose herself and plumped up the pillows where they both had been sitting. “Well, look, it’s been real, but I have to get dressed, so …” She began to gather the glasses and cans from her coffee table.

  “Let me watch you get dressed,” he said softly.

  She turned around abruptly, a sharp rebuke ready on her lips. It died there when she saw the expression on his face. Then she saw the knife.

  Maus drove rapidly up Bradhurst Avenue, through the opening movements of Harlem Saturday night. It would start after suppertime, in the dusty twilight, first the little kids, running in screaming knots under the streetlights and through the schoolyards. Then the older kids would come out and hang in dense pockets around candy and convenience stores, blasting the night with boom-box music, yelling to each other, taunting, playing the dozens, going in and out of old unmuffled cars.

  Later the older men and women would emerge, heading for the liquor stores or the clubs or the storefront churches, according to how they had decided to deal with life in Harlem. Last of all came the players, the pimps, gamblers, whores, runners, drug dealers, although there were getting to be so many of these that competition was driving them toward a continuous presence on the street. Maus drove by several places where drugs were being sold openly, circulating masses of young black men and women who talked little and shook hands with one another a lot.

  Things were getting worse, according to Art Dugman, who had lived here all his life. Dugman had lovingly described for Maus Harlem as it used to be, full of sober, striving people constructing a dignified life in a world of unremitting hatred and contempt, blazing with music, lit by the genius of language.

  “Crime and King killed Harlem,” Dugman would say: crime for obvious reasons and King for leading the fight for civi
l rights and an end to segregation for those with the wit or luck to leave.

  What was left was OK with Maus. Maus loved Harlem. To him it was like the Arabian Nights stories he had loved as a child—squalid, violent, exotic, exciting. This was not an opinion shared by many white cops from Long Island, which was why Maus was in the King Cole Trio and they were not.

  “Turn right on Forty-four. It’s 306,” said Dugman.

  Maus swung the blue Plymouth to the curb half a block east of where 144th Street joined Bradhurst, parking behind a hulk car up on cinder blocks. The hulk doubled as a playground for little kids, a party venue for teens, and a convenient rest stop for junkies on the nod. As the three cops left the car a party was getting under way; a dozen young men and a smaller number of girls were listening to music from a boom box set on the roof of the hulk, laughing, jiving, and passing around a fifth of sweet wine.

  Dugman and Jeffers headed directly for the entrance to number 306, a classic five-story Harlem brownstone with broad limestone steps and balustrades, covered with graffiti and with inhabitants enjoying the early-summer evening. As the two cops mounted the stairs they seemed to bear before them an invisible cloud that suppressed casual conversation and caused the aversion of eyes.

  They climbed three flights. Dugman flicked his head and eyes upward. Jeffers nodded and continued up the stairs. Dugman turned down the hallway to the apartment where Mrs. Booth supposedly lived. Dugman would knock on the door. If Tecumseh Booth was there, either Dugman would grab him or he would go out the fire escape. If he went down, Maus would pick him up; if he went up, Jeffers would. The Trio had done this a lot.

  Down in the street, Maus had become an object of interest to both the young people in the hulk car and the children circulating in the street. Half a dozen little kids asked to see his gun. Several times a corruscating gale of foul language would emerge from a tiny mouth when he refused to do so. Maus just smiled and flicked his eyes from one side of the cliff of buildings to the other, watching the windows, straining his eyes in the gathering dark. As the light faded, the party got bolder.