Justice Denied Read online

  Roland had observed Karp rubbing his lower lip and staring raptly toward the upper left-hand corner of the universe, an infallible indication of dubiety.

  “Well,” said Karp after a pause. “You have a good case. I just don’t think it’s soup yet. The girlfriend, for example—”

  Roland made a dismissive gesture. “Come on, Butch! Let’s say she shows up …” In falsetto, “‘Yes, Officer, my honey was with me all night and until noon, and my squeeze is so sore I can hardly piss.’ No problem on the girl. I’ll take her apart on the stand. She fucked him, maybe she fucked someone else, she’s a slut. I’ll find people she told lies to. If she was a virgin, then she loves him, she’d do anything to save him from jail. If she’s a dog, I put young guys on the jury. If she’s a dish, I’ll make sure it’s full of bags and fags—the usual routine.”

  Karp nodded impatiently. “Right, Roland, I know how to impeach a witness. That wasn’t what I meant. I meant, why isn’t she here? Where is she? What’s she doing? Are the Armenians holding on to her? Is Tomasian being set up for a sacrificial lamb by his own people? Okay, another thing, there’s this business with the license plate and the guns—”

  “Not the stupidity defense, please!”

  “No, although in this case it might even work. I mean it doesn’t jell, one with the other. If for some reason they didn’t mind using their own license plate, then they’d want to be clean as whistles when the cops came around. The defense then attacks the eyesight or credibility of whoever spotted the plate. If for some reason they want the guns around, they have incriminating evidence on site, then they absolutely have to be anonymous when they do the hit. Then the defense can play them as innocent victims interested in self-protection. Which brings up the additional question of why a man who’s got his hands on one of the most effective silent assassination weapons ever invented wants to pull a dumb stunt like shooting a guy in front of a dozen people while he’s parked on a one-way street that’s practically a dead end.”

  “I told you already, they’re amateurs.”

  “Roland, amateurs, shmamateurs, it doesn’t make sense. What’s he got the silenced grease gun for? Fourth of July for the deaf? What I’m saying is, even if he’s never done anything like this before in his life, if he wants this Turk dead, he hangs out at the guy’s apartment late one night and hoses him down with the M3. There’s another angle here that we’re not seeing.”

  Hrcany finished his drink and signaled the waitress to bring another. He did not like the drift of the conversation, and it was not lost on him that the D.A. had asked none of these questions. In fact, Roland was a good enough investigator to have had similar reservations. But it was past time for these. It was now accepted gospel, broadcast to the millions not an hour since, that Tomasian was the guy. All of Roland’s mental energy was now devoted to making sure that, weeks or months hence, twelve jurors would also believe it, beyond a reasonable doubt, to a moral certainty.

  He said, “I know, there’s flaky sides to the case, but I don’t think they’re that important, tactically. People watch a lot of TV killings; they think that’s real life. They don’t figure what’s really going to happen if you do a crime in such and such a place and time. It’ll be hard for the defense to get that point across—”

  “No, Roland, look,” Karp broke in, “I’m not talking tactically. I’m not saying it’s not a good case. It’s a good case. I’m asking, is it the guy? Did he really do it? It’s not the same question as ‘Is it a good case?’”

  “Of course he did it!” snapped Hrcany. “What, you think it was a mugging that went sour? Who the fuck else could it be? He wrote the letter, he made the call, he has the car and the guns and the parka, he killed the guy. Case closed!”

  Karp sighed and drank some more beer. His head was light, probably from the Empirin and codeine pill he had swallowed a few hours earlier, that and the unfamiliar alcohol, and he allowed that his incisive legal mind was probably not tuned to its highest pitch. So Roland was probably right; Karp, himself often a victim of second-guessing by incompetents, was sensitive to his own practice of that vice, and was, besides, disinclined to light his friend’s notoriously short fuse.

  Therefore he smiled pleasantly and changed the subject, which Roland was more than willing to do, and they spoke desultorily of sports for twenty minutes or so, and then Karp got up and said that he ought to go home.

  Home was only six blocks away in a loft building on Crosby off Grand, and Karp walked there now, as he almost always did. His pace, however, was not his usual breakneck lope, but a careful and stately progress, like that of an ancient colonel on the esplanade of a resort. At his door, Karp still had to climb five steep flights of wooden stairs. This he did very slowly, flexing the bad knee as little as possible. It took him nearly ten minutes, and he was pale and faintly nauseated when at last he reached the red-painted steel door to the loft he shared with his family.

  Entering, he staggered over to a tatty couch upholstered in red velvet and threw himself down on it, lifting his feet up on a low table made from a flush door set on concrete pipe. Beyond this table Marlene, his wife, sat cross-legged in a bentwood rocker, with a nest of papers on her lap. She regarded him over the rims of her large, round reading glasses and said, “Where have you been? It’s past seven.”

  “I’ve been drinkin’ away me pay down at the saloon, that’s where,” said Karp. He slipped his shoes off and shrugged out of his raincoat and suit jacket. “And now I want my dinner and a hug from my old woman.”

  She pushed her glasses back on her nose and resumed her study of a document. “Your dinner,” she sniffed, “is congealing in a pan on the stove. There’s bread and salad in the fridge. Pray help yourself. I’m answering motions.”

  She continued to work for a minute or two, but when Karp didn’t stir, she looked up and examined him more closely.

  “Butch? Are you okay? God, you look like death warmed over! Whatever got into you? You know you can’t drink.”

  “Can too,” said Karp.

  “Nonsense! Jewish husbands don’t drink or beat up their wives. I learned that at my mother’s knee. If I wanted a lush I would’ve married somebody I could at least take to church. What’s wrong with you, then?”

  “Nothing,” said Karp. “I’m just tired.”

  “Oh, horseshit! It’s that goddamn knee again, isn’t it? You said you were going to take care of it.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Karp. “Meanwhile, could you get me some ice?”

  She dumped her papers on the floor and snapped her glasses off. Going to the refrigerator, she said, “I ought to make you crawl for it. Honestly, you’re a complete infant.”

  She wrapped a dozen ice cubes in a baggie and a dish towel and brought the ice pack over to Karp, who had slipped out of his trousers in the meantime and unwrapped the Ace bandages that had held the errant joint together all day. His knee looked red, hard, and unnatural, like a pomegranate.

  “Jesus!” she exclaimed. “You can walk on that? It looks like something in the window of a Chinese grocery that the Chinese don’t even know what it is.” She giggled, “God, you look nutty in your shirt and tie and no pants.”

  “Thank you for your support in my hour of need,” Karp said stiffly.

  “Oh, stop it! This is completely your fault, and I’m not going to feel all guilty and rush around being Florence Nightingale. I have an actual infant to take care of. Dammit, see a doctor! Get it fixed!”

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” said Karp grumpily.

  “Honest, swear to God?”

  “Yeah, I’ll see Hudson tomorrow. I’ll tell him it’s an emergency.”

  She looked at him closely to see if he was trying to fob her off with a facile evasion, and then, deciding that he was sincere, plopped down beside him on the sofa and put her arm around his neck.

  He said, “That’s better. Speaking of the actual infant, how is she?”

  “She’s perfect. She’s an angel. But th
e child-care situation is deteriorating badly. Belinda has informed us that she is returning to her beautiful island home in two weeks.”

  “Why? I thought she liked it here.”

  “It’s a family thing, which she told me in great detail and which I won’t repeat. But that makes two exploited third-world women we’ve hired in the past three months to keep me liberated, and I’m sick of it. And don’t give me that look! I’m not stopping work, even if I have to take Lucy into court with me, or better yet, drop her off in your office. You’re a bureau chief. You can sit on your butt all day and give orders.”

  “Wait a second, I thought you were a bureau chief too.”

  “Yes, but my bureau, concerned as it is with trivialities like rape and child abuse, has only five attorneys in it, of whom I am one. I spend six times as much time running my ass off as you do.”

  “There’s a child-care center—”

  “No! I am not going to have our daughter stuck in a disease-ridden barn and shoved in front of a TV all day. Or worse.”

  “No, listen!” he said. “I heard Tina Linski talking to somebody today in the bureau office, a cop—no, she was a parole officer. Her sister had her kid in this group home and they were looking for another baby and she wanted to know if Tina wanted to move her kid in there. I just caught snatches of the conversation, but it sounded real nice. The woman’s got degrees up the ying-yang in early education and child psych—”

  “Who, the parole officer?”

  “No, the woman who takes care of the kids. And the place is in Tribeca. You could drop her off on the way to work.”

  “What was her name, the parole officer?”

  “I didn’t catch it. A kind of chubby woman, short, dark hair. You could ask Tina.”

  “I’m on the case. But it sounds too good to be true. On the other hand, we should be due for some good luck. I got a letter from Lepkowitz today.”

  “What does he want, more rent?”

  “No. It seems that nice old Mr. Lepkowitz in Miami Shores, driven to a final paroxysm of greed by Lepkowitz Junior, has decided to take this building co-op.”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “Indeed. I talked to Larry and Stuart downstairs about it briefly before you got home. Stuart’s been dickering with Lepkowitz Junior. Morton. He’s talking as high as two hundred thou a floor, plus the maintenance is going to run at least four bills a month.”

  Karp felt his stomach turn over. “Christ, Marlene! That’s almost twice what we’re paying in rent. And how’re we going to come up with two hundred large? Take bribes?”

  “It may come to that,” she said. “No, Stu and Larry have been running numbers like crazy. They tell me that if we put most of the forty-five grand we have in CDs into a down payment, and if we both keep working, we’d qualify for a thirty-year note. The monthly nut, principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and maintenance, will run about twenty-two hundred.”

  He gasped. “For this?” he blurted out quite spontaneously. Marlene scowled. It was a sore point between them. She had converted an old electroplating factory loft into a living space, years before the notion of SoHo had been concocted by real estate agents, or the loft area south of Houston Street had gone chichi. When Marlene moved in and did the grueling work of cleaning, painting, wiring, plumbing, and carpentry by herself, or with the help of her family, nobody but a few artists had lived in the area. It had been illegal to live in such buildings. In those days, she would sit on her fire escape and look out at square miles of blackness lit only by the windows of a dozen or so pioneers.

  Now, in the late seventies, companies would convert a loft to the specifications of artistic millionaires. Loft buildings in this part of Manhattan had become gold mines for their owners. And Marlene’s loft was a nice one. It was a single floor-through room over thirty feet wide and a hundred long, with windows on both ends and a big skylight in the middle. At one end, under the huge windows looking out on Crosby Street, was a sleeping platform. There was an enclosed nursery, and the rest of the space was divided by partitions, like a series of stage sets, into a bathroom (which held a rubber thousand-gallon tank that Marlene had rescued from the electroplaters and converted into a hot tub), a fully equipped kitchen, a living area, a dining room under the skylight, a sort of gym-cum-storeroom, and, at the end under the Grand Street windows, an office lushly crowded with house plants.

  On the other hand, Karp thought it was no place to bring up a child. A child had to have, as in his Brooklyn boyhood, a street shaded by sycamore trees, and backyards, and other kids on the street to play potsy and ringelevio with, and there should be a mom who came out at around six, dressed in an apron, to call the kid in off the street. Karp valued his peace too much to actually express this fantasy to Marlene, but it was there in his mind, a constant irritant, now spurred to a fever by the prospect of having to actually buy this place.

  Marlene, naturally, knew precisely what was going on in his mind and would have delivered a devastating riposte had she not been aware that Karp was in considerable physical torment. Instead, therefore, she said, lightly, “Well, we don’t have to worry about it this minute. Lots of things could happen. Lepkowitz père could go out any minute—he’s in his eighties—and with any luck the property could be in probate until Lucy’s ready for Smith, and with a little more luck, Lepkowitz fils could go under a bus, and our problems would be over.”

  “Yeah, and the horse could learn to sing,” said Karp glumly. He lifted the ice pack and inspected his knee. It was down some but not nearly normal; in this it was a model of his life.

  Marlene said, “Yeah. By the way, who were you out drinking with? Some woman?”

  The sudden change of topic threw Karp’s mind out of the muddy rut in which it had been grinding, and left it spinning on the slick ice of Marlene’s attitude.

  “What! No, not a woman. Roland.”

  “That must have been fun. What prompted it? A sudden taste for bad lesbian jokes?”

  “No, Roland cracked, or seems to have cracked, a big case. That shooting over by the U.N.—they found this pathetic amateur terrorist, an Armenian jeweler. So I thought I’d buy him a drink and discuss the case in congenial circumstances.”

  While he was talking, Marlene rose from the couch and went to the bathroom. She took an old blue plaid robe from a hook and carried it over to Karp. Then she busied herself with warming up some food. He watched her work. Her movements were precise, graceful, economical. She closed the refrigerator door just so, she picked up and used implements elegantly—there was never a mess where she had been. He watched her a lot; even after living together for four years, her movements still fascinated him.

  Marlene Ciampi was a medium-sized woman just shy of thirty years old, with a thin, muscular body that her single pregnancy had touched hardly at all. She had a face out of the late Renaissance: cheekbones like knives, a long, straight nose, a wide, lush mouth, a strong jaw and chin. Her brows were heavy and unplucked, and underneath them were two large, dark eyes, only one of which was real.

  “Discuss the case in a bar, huh?” Marlene turned from the stove and gestured with a spatula. “By which I gather you aren’t in love with his Armenian,” she said.

  “How did you figure that out?” said Karp, amazed. He was barely aware of it himself.

  “You forget I’m a trained investigator,” she answered blithely. “Look, Roland’s a friend of yours, but you don’t go out of your way to socialize with him outside the office. He spends a lot of time hanging around saloons, and you never go into a saloon. So why should you all of a sudden decide to go into his turf? Because you wanted to break some bad news and, nice guy that you are, you thought it would go easier if he was comfortable and had a couple of scoops in him. Am I right? Yeah. So how did it go?”

  Karp made a dismissive gesture. “I brought up a few points I thought he should look at.”

  “Such as?”

  “You really want to hear this?”

  “A little, but
I get the feeling you really want to tell it. Here’s your dinner.”

  She had made up a little tray, chicken stew and salad and a heel of Tuscan bread and butter, which she placed carefully across Karp’s lap. He tore into the food ravenously. Marlene was a good cook, if you liked good bread, good coffee, and lumps of miscellaneous material generously sauced and served on rice or spaghetti, and you didn’t mind eating the same thing several days in a row. Between mouthfuls he filled her in on what he had learned of the Tomasian case, and described his vague doubts.

  “So you don’t think this Armenian did it?” asked Marlene when he had concluded his story.

  “I didn’t say that. I said there’s things about the case that would make me uneasy if it was my case, and I expressed that to Roland.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “Not well. He was doing his massive jaw-clenching routine when I decided to drop the subject.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Marlene. “It sounds like it’s a mega-case that could make him famous, and here’s you throwing sand in the gears. He’s jealous of you to begin with—”

  “Roland? He’s not jealous of me. I think he thinks I’m a little wimpy, if anything, because I don’t drink and fuck everything above room temperature and talk tough with the cops.”

  “That’s right,” she replied, “and even though you don’t, you’re famous, and you have the best homicide conviction record in the city, and you got to play pro ball—”

  “And I’m married to an incredibly beautiful woman—”

  “In your dreams, and he can’t stand not being the biggest swinging dick on the street.”