Tainted Evidence

by Robert Daley

  Karen too marched up and down in front of the jury box, maintaining eye contact.

  "The defense has offered no evidence, none, of police corruption relative to this case, none of police intent to murder the defendant, none that the police fired first, none of any legitimate right of self defense by the defendant. Instead, consider the evidence you did hear. Evidence of a man so dangerous, surrounded by such an arsenal of guns, that twenty men went to arrest him. How many policemen have fallen in pools of their own blood because they attempted to make such arrests with too few men? Twenty men were necessary. This was normal police procedure. Ten were posted at the building exits, others were on the roof, the fire escapes, most of them not even in position when the shooting started. The defendant shot them down without warning, not in self defense but solely in his frenzy to escape. If you acquit him now you send a powerful message to criminals--that when police officers come to arrest you for your crimes, you can shoot them down with impunity and afterwards claim self defense, and get away with it. Ladies and gentlemen, if that is the message you mean to give, then none of us is any longer safe, and democracy itself is threatened. You have five counts of attempted murder of police officers to consider, and four counts of possession of illegal weapons. There is only one verdict you can give."

  She went through the evidence step by step citing the testimony in each case: how Epps was located, how the raid was planned, how it actually occurred, how the shooting started, how five cops were severely wounded by the defendant. She was lucid, vivid, forceful, she thought. She talked for two hours.

  "Mr. McCarthy is asking you to acquit a man who happens to be black who shot down five police officers who happen to be white. A street thug who shot to kill five other men. He is asking for an acquittal which, if you give it to him on purely racial grounds, will set race relations in this city and country back twenty years. Perhaps more. I beg of you not to do it."

  She paused. "The evidence against Lionel Epps is overwhelming," she told them. "There is only one verdict you can give."

  When she had finished and sat down, flushed with her own rhetoric and with Coombs' whispered congratulations, she was able to convince herself that she had done her job perfectly, that a guilty verdict was the only one possible, that she had nothing to worry about at all.

  Karen returned to her office where she chaired a meeting of her bureau chiefs. She listened to their problems, to suggestions for possible solutions, but couldn't keep her mind on it. She watched the clock. She watched the phone. Werner from budget and management came in after that. She could barely understand what he was telling her. If the case was really as open and shut as she hoped and believed, the guilty verdict might come at any moment.

  But at ten P.M. she was notified that the jury had retired for the night, with no verdict having been reached. She went down to the street and had herself driven back to Jill's apartment. It was too late to phone her children, and she had no great desire to talk to Hank tonight, she wasn't sure why. She took a long shower, then came out to the kitchen where she made herself a sandwich. She watched the eleven o'clock news: herself being interviewed in the corridor outside the courtroom. I look haggard, she thought. She turned off the set and went to bed.

  Chapter 21

  She was hanging her coat in the closet the next morning when Betty came in and read out the day's schedule.

  "You have the Corrections Commissioner at 8:30--overcrowding on Rikers Island. Deputy Mayor Blueberg is next, then the President of the Bar Association, then luncheon at Borough Hall in Brooklyn--"

  "Better cancel the luncheon. The verdict could come in at any moment.” A quick verdict was sure to be in her favor. Karen was still confident.

  All day she waited, but there was no verdict.

  Then it was night again. Wearing a bathrobe, hugging a pillow, she watched an old movie on TV. When the phone suddenly rang she rushed to pick it up.

  "Yes, Larry, what's happened?"

  The second day's deliberations were over, he said. The jury had again retired for the night: "So I guess we can retire too.”

  "Yes," said Karen. "Goodnight, Larry."

  Having hung up she thought about calling for her car and going home. Instead she went into the bedroom and began to pull the bedspread down.

  The next day, Saturday, she put on her sweat suit and sneakers and jogged west through Greenwich Village past the town houses, the restaurants, the smart shops and the craft shops, the galleries. She jogged at a good pace, jogging in place at the corners until the lights changed, then jogging across, trying to jog off the tension and worry. She jogged all the way west to the river, her car trailing behind her, and then out along the long empty pier where she stood breathing somewhat hard and staring down at the water. The Hudson this morning was gray and choppy. She could see other piers up and down the river, all unused now, some of them rotting and collapsing into the water. They had been built for ocean commerce, especially the big transatlantic liners of the past. Nobody came out onto them anymore except joggers like herself, or dog walkers or, in the warm months, the homeless looking for a place to sleep. She remembered when she was a little girl standing up in the back of the car riding past them along the West Side Highway. Her mother and father, up front, paying no attention. The liners were moored side by side with only the piers in between, you could count the great smoke stacks for block after block. Well, the liners were gone forever with nothing to replace them. You couldn't count the airplanes out at the airports. Her childhood was gone forever too, and there was nothing to replace that either. Having children of her own was not the same thing. And she ought to be thinking more about them, and less about herself.

  Her confidence was gone this morning. The verdict should have been reached long ago. It was an open and shut case, was it not? And if the jury didn't see it that way, then she was in trouble. She was as low as she had ever been: not good enough to convict Lionel Epps, not good enough to be district attorney of New York County.

  The water looked cold. There were no vessels on it anywhere, not even a sail boat. A magnificent natural harbor no longer much used. The calendar said it was now spring, but a cold wind bit against her face, blew through her hair, turned the sweat on her body cold. Turning, she looked back at her car waiting at the head of the pier, the patient Detective McGillis visible behind the windshield. He monitored the radio, and would signal her if her office signaled him. At any moment he might wave frantically, meaning that a verdict had been reached, and she would come running.

  However, this did not happen.

  There were gulls sailing around over the water, a few of them over her head. The sky was as grey as the water. Her hands were plunged into the pockets of her sweat suit. She did not mind the wind in her face. She kept turning around and looking at the car, reassuring herself that it was there, afraid to let it out of her sight.

  Finally she jogged back to it.

  "Anything come over?"

  "Not a thing, Mrs. Henning."

  She began to jog back to Jill's apartment.

  Barone in a wind breaker on a ladder was repairing a rain gutter that had come down in a storm. He was brooding about Muldoon, about a man's responsibilities toward his partner. Presently he got down from the ladder, went upstairs and changed his clothes. His wife found him standing half in his closet knotting his tie.

  "I gotta go in," he told her.

  "Hey," she said, "you were supposed to do some work around here today. The house is falling apart."

  "I'll be back in a couple of hours," he said, giving her a smile and a squeeze on the bottom.

  He drove toward the city at his usual speed and a state trooper came up behind him with the red light turning. He pulled over and got out of the car with his shield in his hand.

  It made the other cop stop short, his hand on his gun. "Get back in the car," he ordered.

  Barone showed his shield. "I'm a New York City detective."

  He saw the other cop relax. "Oka
y," the cop said, "but slow down for crissake. You'll kill somebody."

  "I'm in a terrific hurry."

  "Even so."

  They shook hands, leaned on Barone's fender and exchanged names.

  "Where they got you working?" the cop asked conversationally.

  As soon as he could, Barone broke it off. Back on the highway again, driving as fast as ever, he was annoyed at the time he had lost. Getting stopped was always a pain in the ass. You had to chat with the guy. If it cost you only five or ten minutes you were lucky.

  He parked beside the criminal courts building in a slot reserved for a judge and went in past the security desk and up to the eighth floor. The judges weren't working today and he had left his PBA card in the windshield.

  He had expected Karen would be there waiting for the verdict, but she was not. Her office door was closed, and Coombs was seated at her secretary's desk going through the mail.

  "What news from the jury room?" Barone inquired.

  "Nothing. They're still at it."

  "No rumors?"

  "No."

  "Where's Karen?"

  "In her apartment, I think. Or in her car."

  To approach Karen on behalf of Muldoon would not be easy. He had been brooding about it for sixty miles. He did not know how he would do it. She did not owe him any favors. He did not look forward to it. He did not believe she would be receptive. She would not only say no, but would think less of him as well. But Muldoon had asked him to do it, and Muldoon was his partner. He had no choice. It had to be done. He saw no way out.

  But she was not in her office, which meant he would have to go to her apartment. She was Manhattan district attorney. He could not just knock on her door. He needed a pretext.

  "She asked me to meet her," he told Coombs. "I guess she meant in the apartment. You got anything you want me to take over there?"

  Coombs put together a whole manila envelope full of stuff, which was a great relief.

  Karen showered, put on a bathrobe and lay out on the sofa and tried to study dossiers relating to other cases, other office business. This was work she would have to do sooner or later, so she had brought it home with her, but to concentrate on it was impossible. She stood up stretching, trying to stretch away tension, boredom, worry.

  Glancing around, she conceived the notion that the flat was filthy and that it was her job to clean it. At least it would take her mind off everything else. She went into the bedroom where she found a T-shirt and shorts belonging to Jill and changed into them.

  The vacuum was in the hall closet and she dragged it out. She vacuumed the bedroom first, moving the furniture around, ramming the power nozzle as far under the bed as it would go. After that she did the main room. She worked mindlessly, once knocking a lamp off a table, catching it just in time. Even housework demanded a certain concentration, it seemed. She warned herself to pay attention, but couldn't. She began to vacuum the windowsills, the moldings, but the machine popped open because the bag was full and though she searched every closet and cabinet in the flat she could not find a replacement.

  Which left her staring at the phone again. She began to pace, and as she did so she noticed things she had not noticed before, though she had already explored this flat thirty times. The breakfront in the dining room contained a tea service, a soup tureen, a chafing dish, some silver salt and pepper shakers, all tarnished. After staring at them a while she got them out and ranged them on the dining room table. Gifts from previous weddings, probably. Hadn't been polished in years, probably. Who had time for polishing silver these days?

  She found silver polish under the kitchen sink and began cleaning the silver, scrubbing hard. For the second time that morning she worked up a sweat. She worked clumsily, but realized it only when she broke a handle off the chafing dish. It made her curse.

  "Damn," she said aloud. Which failed to express how she felt. "Damn, damn, damn," she cursed.

  She pieced the pieces together this way and that, but of course they would not stick, which made her unreasonably furious at herself. She would have to take the thing to a silversmith, still another chore, and she did not have time for all the chores she had already.

  At that moment the doorbell rang and she went to it, thinking it must be McGillis, for the car was still outside, ready to rush her back to the courthouse, if necessary. Probably he wanted permission to go to lunch--what time was it anyway--and she threw back the bolts.

  She opened the door and it was Mike Barone.

  She faced him barefoot wearing shorts, with her bra showing through her t-shirt probably, feeling sweaty. It was not the way she wanted to see him or anybody else, and there was a moment when she did not know what to do or say.

  "Oh," she said, "it's you."

  He had surprised her, and she was discomforted by her appearance, but she was certainly not going to show this, much less keep him waiting outside while she ran into the bedroom like some blushing schoolgirl and changed her clothes.

  Good manners demanded that she invite him in, so she stepped back from the doorway, and did so. "How are you?" she said curtly.

  Surely he was here for some specific reason and would depart in a moment. She waited for him to tell her what it was.

  "I'm sorry if I've surprised you," he apologized.

  "You didn't surprise me."

  He looked at her as if they had been friends for years, as if his knowledge of her was intimate. It should have been objectionable, but somehow was not, however uncomfortable it made her. She would have preferred a sexy leer which she could have dismissed by getting angry.

  "You look nice," he said.

  He was tall and wearing a suit and tie. "I look awful."

  "Not to me."

  She was amazed to hear her voice ask: "How do I look to you?"

  "Less like a district attorney, more like a woman.”

  Since being appointed DA most of the cops with whom she came in contact had taken, as it were, one or two steps backward, treating her with a deference that had not been there previously. Some were not at ease at all. Not Barone however. He seemed as comfortable in her presence as before.

  She said: "You mean like women are supposed to look. Like a cleaning woman or a housewife for instance. Unthreatening to men."

  "That's not what I mean at all.” He smiled. "I just meant you look real. Earthy. Forgive me. I can't help responding to you."

  This was not the type conversation she was expecting.

  "I happened to be at the courthouse on another matter," Barone said. "I thought you'd be there waiting for the verdict."

  "Well, I'm not.”

  "I stopped at your office to say hello," he explained.

  "All right," she said, "hello.” To stop in at her office was one thing, to seek her out here was something else.

  "They had a lot of mail for you."

  She didn't say anything.

  "They asked me to bring it over," he said, and handed her the manila envelope.

  "Thank you," she said, taking it.

  "This waiting for a verdict is driving me crazy," he said, and stopped and looked at her, as if expecting a response.

  "Yes," she conceded, "it's driving me crazy too."

  "What do you think it means?"

  "Well, you can't figure juries."

  "This particular case is not just your case alone," he said. "It's mine too. Today is the third day the jury has been out."

  When she made no answer he added: "When the jury stays out this long, it's probably a good sign."

  "I don't know what to think.” She put the envelope down on a sideboard. "Well," she said, "thanks for the mail."

  "No one ever fired shots at me before. That's why it's so personal. I suppose that's the reason."

  Perhaps the case was principally what interested him, not her at all. He had needed to talk to someone and had picked her.

  To make conversation she said: "When you were on that rooftop and he was shooting at you, were you scared?" />
  "At the moment no. It all happened too fast."

  "Afterwards?"

  "When I started down from the roof my knees turned to mush. I was trying to run down the fire escape. My knees were trembling and wouldn't hold me. I nearly fell down."

  She laughed.

  "I had hold of the iron banister and my knees let go and I sat down on the step."

  She was laughing.

  "It's true," he said.

  She was touched that he would offer her so intimate a glimpse of himself.

  He said: "He fired probably twenty five shots altogether. He tried to kill us all. He deserves to be convicted."

  "Yes."

  They looked at each other. His eyes were dark brown, almost black. He had beautiful teeth.

  He said: "I haven't been able to sleep through the night since the jury went out. You must be twice as worried. When I stopped at your office I thought maybe it would help me if I could talk to you, and that maybe it would help you too."

  They were still in the entrance hall, which seemed to her impolite.

  "The time must really be dragging for you," he said.

  She nodded.

  "Perhaps you'd like a cup of tea," she said finally. I'm always offering him tea, she thought. She didn't know whether to lead him into the kitchen or the living room--or what to do with him after that.

  He seemed to sense her indecision. "Listen," he said, "why don't we go out and have lunch? I need some cheering up, and you probably do too.”

  Should she? It was a way of getting him out of this claustrophobic apartment. And herself out as well.