No Lesser Plea Read online

  Louis, on the other hand, had plenty of imagination and his mind was continually writhing with plans and contingencies. Although he affected the style and speech of a bad street thug, he was in fact the product of a comfortable middle-class home, his mother a schoolteacher, his father an undertaker and part-time preacher. Straight had been the gate and narrow the way in the Louis household: Mandeville’s two older brothers and younger sister had grown up strong in the church and, riding the crest of the civil-rights movement, had risen well in the world—dentist, lawyer, high-school principal.

  But in one of those quirks of human development that confounds liberal philosophy, Mandeville, at eight, had had an illumination, or rather its opposite. It suddenly occurred to him that the complexities of the moral life—thinking of others, giving rather than receiving, following the commandments—and the plaguing guilt and conscience that enforced them, could be dispensed with. If one was clever enough to avoid detection and capture, one could do anything, anything. You could curse God in church and nothing would happen. You could sneak into the church and pee on the altar cloth and the minister’s robes. You could steal a kitchen knife and dismember your sister’s kitten. And if you slipped and got caught (and this was almost the best part), you could wail and beg forgiveness, and promise never to do it again and quote the gospel about the prodigal son and all that bullshit, and they believed it!

  Of course, one does get a reputation. By fifteen, Mandeville was known around his suburban Philadelphia neighborhood as a bad boy, although he was protected from major consequences by the mighty respectability of his family, by the inability of the community to believe that so sterling a house could bring forth such a monster, and by the belief, sadly strained by the passage of years, that he “was young yet,” and would “grow out of it.”

  Mandeville by this time had discovered his talent for armed robbery. He was a highwayman in the lanes behind the elementary school, growing rich on the lunch money and allowances of his terrified victims; lacking sword and pistol he made do with an ice pick. So effective was this instrument, when applied gently to the eyelids, at producing instant compliance, that Mandeville was unprepared when an unusually spunky eleven-year-old girl had not only refused him her lunch money, but had called him a dumb asshole and kicked him painfully in the shins.

  He felt he had no choice but to chase her down and work her over a little with the ice pick, thus discovering both the limits of his community’s tolerance and the foolishness of leaving witnesses.

  The girl had staggered home, bleeding from dozens of wounds, with a piece of Mandeville’s windbreaker clutched in her hand. The police were called, Mandeville was arrested while trying to burn the torn and bloody windbreaker in his backyard, and at the juvenile hearing scores of children and their parents came forward to accuse him. For his part, Mandeville was outraged that his sincere repentance, his neat suit and polished shoes, and the reputation of his family cut no ice with the presiding judge. He was sentenced to a year in the state reformatory.

  On the evening of his first day on the inside he was given the obligatory beating by the boss kid of his cottage, a huge and brutal redneck youth who had by no means enjoyed Mandeville’s advantages in life, and knew it, and was looking forward to making the thin, scholarly looking black boy’s life hell on earth.

  This was an error. Simple brutality is rarely a match for evil. Mandeville scrounged around under the cottages the next day until he found a foot and a half of siding with a rusted tenpenny nail sticking through it. He twisted the nail out of its hole, put it in his pocket, and shoved the slat into his belt under his shirt. He also picked up a small chunk of cinder block.

  That night, Mandeville was beaten again and forced to perform a sexual act upon the body of the boss kid. This gave him the opportunity to crawl under his blanket and sob, the sound of which provided a cover for what he was really doing, which was putting a needle point on his nail by rubbing it against the cinder block.

  Around three in the morning, Mandeville forced the nail back into the hole in the slat, and carrying the slat and the chunk of cinder block, padded over to where the big youth lay sleeping. By the moonlight filtering in through the wire-meshed window he carefully positioned the nail over the youth’s eye and drove it home with a powerful blow of the cinder block. Then he went back to bed.

  Things like this happen often at reformatories. The big kid had many enemies and the investigation was desultory, as Mandeville had calculated. Nobody bothered him for the rest of his stay. He also became a model prisoner. He was polite to the staff, attended lectures dutifully, and worked on his reading. He was employed in the library. Here he delved deeply into whatever books it possessed on the law and the workings of the criminal justice system. He read Crime and Punishment with great interest, as a text. He followed Raskolnikov’s rap at the beginning with approval, and was confused and annoyed when the dumb-ass turned himself in.

  Mandeville got out in eight months. On returning home, he found not the prodigal’s welcome he expected as his due, but a destroyed family. His father had died—of shame mostly—and his mother had withdrawn into an impenetrable melancholia. With his brothers away at college it fell to his sister to inform him that he need no longer consider himself a member of the Louis family. This was fine with Mandeville, but, he figured, they owed him something for not sticking by him in his hour of need. After all, what was a family for?

  In fact, he figured they owed him all the money in the house, his father’s gold watch and his mother’s tiny hoard of jewelry. His sister was foolish enough to try to stop him and got knocked down and kicked in the head a couple of times. There was enough to get him set up in the big city, which he reached in late 1965. The times and the man conspired—there has hardly ever been a better milieu to begin business as an armed robber than a large American city in the period between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the resignation of Richard Nixon—“the sixties.” The citizens were rich and disinclined to divert from their private use the monies necessary to run a criminal justice system remotely adequate for the scale of the problem, a problem that stemmed from the vast increase in the number of unemployed young men and the disappearance from most big cities of anything for all those young men to do for an honest living.

  Then there was the guilt. The political movements of the time had taught the middle classes something about their complicity in injustice and brutality. Perhaps people who committed crimes were simply responding to irresistible social forces. Perhaps crime was a form of political protest. Look what we were doing in Vietnam… .

  Thus, as London at the end of the sixteenth century was a hot place to be a literary genius, and France at the end of the eighteenth century was a hot place to be a military genius, New York in the sixties was made for a murderous psychopath like young Mandeville Louis. He thrived.

  Even Louis himself understood this. As he swayed in his seat on the uptown Lexington Avenue local, with the murder weapons and the profits from his most recent crime on his person, he knew how slim his chances were of being caught, tried, and punished.

  Still, there was something wrong. Something niggled at the back of his mind. Walker was wrong, for one thing. He didn’t like a junkie with a family—people could ask questions if something happened to him, and Louis’s career was founded on only the most shallow level of questions ever being asked about his criminal activities. Even Elvis, sitting happily next to him in his simple and murderous innocence, was a little wrong. Louis had never had a real accomplice—patsies, yes, but nobody who was really in with him. This need for some human contact shamed him; it was a blemish on the polished and icy globe of his perfection. Perhaps he would have to get rid of the kid, too.

  But deeper than these disturbing thoughts, something else was starting to stir through the mind of Mandeville Louis, almost imperceptibly, like the flutterings of a small moth. Though he could not know it, it was in fact an intimation of the moral order of the universe, which dwells
somewhere in all conscious beings, even those far gone in evil, even—the theologians tell us—within the demons in the lowest hell. It is told often proverbially: “God is not mocked,” we say, or “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”

  A shiver ran through Louis’s body. “Somebody walked on my grave,” he thought. But it was not that. It was the first shadow of something that would have been recognized instantly in the ancient world, which understood these matters rather better than we do today. They called it nemesis.

  Chapter 3

  Nemesis was six-five and a bit, well-muscled, with a bad left knee. At seven o’clock on the morning after the Marchione killings, Roger Karp, called “Butch,” an assistant district attorney for New York County, was slowly rising from what was literally the sleep of the just. As he awakened he experienced, as usual, a moment of disorientation. He was not in the bedroom of the comfortable apartment he had shared with Susan. Susan was in California, with the furniture. He was in a renovated two-room apartment on West 10th Street off Sixth Avenue, with no furniture. Actually, he had a Door Store platform bed and a rowing machine; everything else he owned was in storage or at the office. The place had a kitchen, which he never used. The range and refrigerator were new and still had their packing slips and little instructional booklets tucked inside. Not a domestic guy, Karp. The bed and the rowing machine didn’t fit in the office, or he would not have needed an apartment at all.

  Karp stretched, swung his legs out of bed and stood up. By habit, he bounced a little on his left leg. The knee neither locked nor collapsed. Dr. Marvin Rosenwasser, orthoped of Palo Alto, was not God (except in the opinion of his mother) but his patellar re-creation seemed to be functioning approximately as well as the original—on a light-duty basis, of course. It would not stand a pounding dash down the length of a basketball court or a leap for a rebound, which is why Karp was an attorney, rather than a professional basketball player, in New York.

  In his faded Berkeley sweatpants, of which he had retained a prodigious supply, Karp walked over to his rowing machine, sat in its seat, put his feet in the stirrups, and pulled boldly into the current. The room was cool. The windows were open and the morning air was touched with the smell of rain. Still, after ten minutes Karp was running a sweat and after twenty he was dripping. He had the tension on the rowing machine set to its highest level. Karp didn’t believe in taking it easy. At thirty-two he had managed to retain a body that, legs aside, could still have started in the NBA: big shoulders, a hard slab of torso, sinewy arms, thick wrists.

  He rose from the machine, stripped, and went into the bathroom. It was the best thing about the tiny apartment, being one of the original bathrooms from the days when each story of the apartment house had only four flats instead of ten. It had a patterned tile floor in three shades of tan against black and white, an alcove behind the door housing an ornate cast-iron radiator where you could heat towels, high ceilings, sculpted cornices covered with three inches of yellowing paint, a huge cast-iron bathtub with ball-and-claw feet, with a chrome shower ring, and one of those old-fashioned flat shower heads.

  Karp turned on the cold water almost full and then goosed the hot faucet gingerly. The room was immediately filled with steam. Karp had retained his athlete’s taste for hot showers, but the old building, equipped with boilers on the scale of those that drove the Carinthia to win the Atlantic Blue Ribbon, often supplied too much of a good thing.

  After finishing in the bathroom, Karp dressed in a lawyer’s dark blue pinstriped suit, black shoes and socks. He made the bed, picked up his briefcase, and left the apartment.

  The Manhattan DA’s office was at Foley Square, about two miles away; when it didn’t rain, Karp walked the distance. He walked down Sixth, over to Broadway, and then straight south, moving fast, with long powerful strides. Every ten steps or so Dr. Rosenwasser’s magic knee would give a little soundless pop, just to let everybody know it was still on the job. Most people would have felt it as a jab of pain, but Karp had been playing hurt since he was twelve years old. “No pain, no gain,” had been drummed into him by a succession of beefy older men, until he had grown up into a perfect little masochist. Winning made the difference; it was the balm beyond compare, the incomparable analgesic. So that when, playing hurt, Karp had received the injury that ended his athletic career, and the beefy older men had no more time for him, it was natural to switch to criminal law, a field that presented many of the same conditions and offered many of the same rewards as topflight athletics.

  It had the same elements of intense preparation and concentration, of confrontation in a circumscribed arena, where passion and aggression were bound by elaborate rules, of the final decision, and the emotional charge that went with it: won, lost, guilty, not guilty. He had done well at law school—Berkeley—and had earned a place on what was generally agreed to be the Celtics or the Knicks of the prosecutorial league—the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, then in its last years under the direction of the legendary, the incorruptible, the incomparable Francis P. Garrahy.

  In fact, as he walked that morning past the lower fringes of Greenwich Village, past the faded commercial streets of lower Broadway, the chic squalor of Soho, the tacky circus of Canal Street, and into the gray ramparts that held the administrative heart of New York, he felt again that little turmoil in the belly that for years had signaled for him the start of competition. His shoulders flexed, his jaw tightened, his face, which when relaxed was fairly pleasant—broad forehead, slightly crumpled largish nose, full mouth, gray eyes—became grim, even predatory. He began to look like what they tell you to look like in New York—if you don’t want to get mugged.

  By the time Karp rolled into Foley Square, he had worked up a mild sweat and an appetite. He cut across Chambers Street and went into Sam’s to take on fuel. Sam’s was a luncheonette, one of the thousands of such establishments, all different and all the same, that had been dispensing fast and semi-fast food to New Yorkers for generations before the appearance of the first Golden Arch. Nobody remembered when Sam’s had come to Foley Square; probably Foley used to stop by for a prune Danish and a container of coffee before going out to collect graft. Sam’s had a street window that was opened for knishes and egg creams in mild weather, a counter, four booths, six tables, tile floors, a stamped tin ceiling and a pay phone.

  Karp was greeted by the current proprietor, Gus.

  “Two?”

  “Yeah,” said Karp. “One butter, one cream cheese.” As Gus sliced and toasted the bagels, Karp glanced around the breakfast-crowded store. Mostly courtroom types, lower-level bureaucrats, a couple of hard cases with their lawyers, getting the story straight before the trial.

  “Hey, Butch.”

  Karp saw Ray Guma, another assistant district attorney, waving from a rear booth, and waved back. Gus was about to wrap the bagels in waxed paper and put them in a bag, but Karp stopped him.

  “Don’t bother with that, I’ll eat them here.”

  “I already put the coffee in a container, I’ll get a cup.”

  “No, that’s alright,” said Karp, “I like the cardboard.”

  He paid and walked back to where Guma was sitting, balancing his bagels on top of his coffee container and clutching his briefcase under his arm.

  “Hey, Goom,” he said. “Hey, V.T.! I didn’t see you. This adds a tone of unwonted elegance to my breakfast.”

  “Good morning, Roger,” said V.T. Newbury. “Do join us.”

  The two men were both assistant DA’s like Butch Karp, and like Karp were both athletes and both smart and aggressive men. Besides that the three had little in common. V.T. (for Vinson Talcott) Newbury was Old New York Money, Yale, Harvard Law, and an intercollegiate single sculls champion two years in a row. He was an extraordinarily handsome man: straight blond hair, worn long and swept back from a widow’s peak, large blue eyes, even, chiseled features, and a lithe well-proportioned body. He looked like the kind of man that cigarette ads in the
1920s depicted to show that their products had class. Luckily for envious souls, he was quite short, a hair under five-seven. He was sensitive about this modest flaw and had adopted—as a matter of self-protection—a sardonic mien, often describing himself as “a perfect little gentleman.”

  Ray Guma was short too, but with no obvious compensating physical virtues. He had a funny, swarthy, gargoylish face in constant, extravagant motion, mounted on a stocky and hairy body, with big ears and a little neck. He had grown up rough and tough in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn, one of six children of an Italian plumber. He’d gone to Fordham on a baseball scholarship (shortstop), played a season in the Yankee farm system, batted .268 (he had trouble with inside curves), and then had worked his way through NYU Law.

  Guma slid over and Karp sat down next to him. V.T. said, “I’m glad you stopped by, my boy. Perhaps you can settle a fine point of discussion for us. My learned friend here was just speculating on the sexual proclivities of our colleague, the divine Ms. Ciampi.”

  “Definitely a dyke,” said Guma.

  “It’s true,” said Newbury. “The evidence is overwhelming, especially from one for whom the laws of evidence are life itself. Consider the facts: one, we know that Ray Guma, Mad Dog Guma, is irresistible to women …”

  “Awww, V.T., I didn’t say that …”

  “Irresistible, I say, and two, the luscious Ciampi, undeniably a woman, has succeeded where all women before her have failed, in resisting his fabled blandishments. Not even a cheap feel can he cop in the dingy corridors of justice. What do we conclude, gentlemen of the jury? That Guma is losing his touch? That the technique to which legions of cocktail waitresses and singles-bar secretaries have succumbed no longer works? Never, I say! The explanation, the only explanation that will stand the test of reason is that Ciampi is queer, a bull-dagger in fact.”