Counterplay

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Karp shook his head. “Nah, you know I’m too impatient for chess. I saw it earlier on the floor and figured it was yours or V.T.’s, so I put it there.”

  Guma and V. T. Newbury were two of Karp’s oldest friends. They’d all graduated law school and hooked up with the New York DAO within a few years of each other. In contrast to Guma, or Karp, Newbury possessed a dry wit and cool exterior, and had been a handsomely aristocratic Yale Law boy and the scion of a senior partner in one of the city’s most prestigious white-shoe law firms; but he’d turned his back on civil litigation and wealth for the low-pay but high-reward task of prosecuting criminals. Guma was the hot-blooded son of Italian immigrants. When just starting out at the DAO, he’d carried quite a chip on his broad, neckless shoulders, especially around better-heeled colleagues, but it had been offset by his sense of humor, abilities in the courtroom, and general joie de vivre.

  Both Guma and Newbury possessed rapier-sharp legal minds. But Newbury preferred the complex, thinking-man’s cases, which was why Karp had him heading up the White Collar Fraud and Rackets Bureau. The bureau primarily focused on business fraud, organized crime, and public corruption. He and his team, known around the office as “the Newbury Gang,” had aggressively and successfully prosecuted high-level politicians, government officials, and other white-collar felons in and out of the justice system.

  Meanwhile, Guma liked his cases down and dirty, the messier the better. He hated to plea bargain and was happiest in the courtroom in front of jurors—preferably women jurors—watching him dismantle the bad guy’s defense and send him off to prison.

  One thing they did have in common was the game of chess. They’d been going at it ever since Karp had known them, both playing in styles that matched their personalities. Newbury preferred the classical attacks and defenses; he could name them and recall the point at which they’d been used in world tournaments. Guma had learned his game at the knee of old Italian men sitting in parks on sunny days. He simply attacked, making up for his lack of finesse with an innate sense for an opponent’s weaknesses. Defense was a foreign word to Guma, except when applied to the other attorney, at which point it became a curse word.

  “Not mine,” Guma said of the chess piece, which he put back on the table. “Maybe V.T.’s. It’s certainly his taste—expensive—but I’ve never seen that particular bishop. Check out the detail in the carving. It looks like a little statue.”

  “I’ll check it out later,” Karp said, yawning. “Excuse me, guess I’m a little bushed. So what’s this case you’re all pumped up about? And don’t you want to bring it up at the regular meeting?”

  Every Monday morning, Karp met with his bureau chiefs and a few other select assistant district attorneys to review cases, which meant grilling each other to ensure that the convicting evidence was trustworthy and looking to shore up weaknesses. The practice had started with the Old Man, Frank Garrahy, who believed that cases were won or lost in the preparation stages, long before they went to trial.

  “I will next week,” Guma said, reaching into his coat pocket for a cigar, which he stuck in his mouth without lighting. “But I wanted to run it by you first, and for you to meet someone, before I take it to the rest of the law-school underachievers you employ.”

  “Meet?” Karp said, looking at his watch. “When?”

  “In about three minutes, if this kid is punctual, and I suspect he will be,” Guma said. “But there’s another reason why I wanted to talk about this before the meeting; you know how some people like talking to the media more than they should.”

  Karp had a standing rule that no one in his office was supposed to discuss anything with the press without prior approval—especially to comment on ongoing cases. But it was only natural for young assistant district attorneys, some of whom got invited to the meeting to discuss big cases, to want to highlight their exalted position as “someone in the know” by leaking juicy tidbits to the media. Karp was also getting uneasy with the way Guma was obviously trying to break bad news to him “gently.”

  “Spill it, Guma,” he growled. “You’re getting entirely too much pleasure out of watching me squirm.”

  “Payback for the Milquetost innuendos.” Guma smiled at his friend over the tip of the cigar as he slouched further into the chair. “The ‘other reason’ is there may be political implications with pursuing this case at this time.”

  “Great.”

  “Let me give you a little background,” Guma said, taking his cigar out of his mouth and sitting forward. “As you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time going through old files in that cold, tiny cubicle you so graciously arranged for me in the basement—”

  “You asked to be down there.”

  “Yeah, but you might have installed some carpeting and a light or two more than the single bulb dangling from a wire in the ceiling—”

  “Objection: exaggeration. Get on with it, Goom.”

  “Sure, sure. Anyway, I’m shivering in the near-dark at my minuscule desk when I get a telephone call from some guy who says some other guy saw his dad choke his mother. The guy on the phone says they think the dad killed her because she disappeared suddenly without a word.”

  “Seems pretty straightforward,” Karp said. “Why aren’t they going to the cops?”

  “Because it’s a cold case. The cops aren’t interested.”

  “You believe it?”

  “Maybe,” Guma said. “I went and talked to the son who supposedly witnessed the murder. At first, he was surprised I knew about it, but then he loosened up and told me the story. Pretty believable as witnesses go, but there are a couple of reasons I wanted to get a second opinion from you before I go forward with this. For one thing, the woman disappeared fourteen years ago.”

  Karp whistled. A lot of police departments across the country were creating “cold case” squads to revive old homicide cases. There was no statute of limitations on murder and forensic sciences had been making enormous strides in recent years. But not many DAOs that he knew of were conducting their own investigations.

  Then again, Guma wasn’t on the regular payroll. If he and his former detective pal, Clarke Fairbrother, wanted to knock the dust off some old files and see if they could bring some killer to justice, more power to them. But fourteen years was a long time—witnesses die or disappear or “forget”; evidence gets lost…and what about this “political ramification,” he thought. That didn’t sound good. “You want to drop the other shoe now, please.”

  Guma sucked on the cigar and looked down at it lovingly before turning his gaze back to Karp. “This kid’s father is Emil Stavros.”

  Karp let out an involuntary groan. Emil Stavros. Wealthy banker, moved in the best social circles, and, of greater concern, a major mover and shaker in the opposition party. The party that had at one time backed Andrew Kane as the next mayor of the Big Apple. The thought of Kane…the dead children…Fulton crippled…he had to focus to hear Guma.

  “Hey, I know,” Guma said, holding up a hand. “Bad timing with the election seven months away. We can always wait and go after this in December…if you win. If you don’t, well, I expect we’ll all be fired and that will be the last we hear of it.”

  Karp caught the challenge in Guma’s comment. His old friend didn’t give a rat’s ass about politics, nor did he have much respect for those who let it influence their decisions. “Let’s presume for a moment that I win the election, what are the other hazards of waiting so that this doesn’t come off as dirty politics?”

  Guma shrugged. “Well, I suppose something bad could happen to this kid.”

  “Kid?”

  “Zachary Stavros…kid as in almost twenty years old. He and his old man are estranged.”

  “And you’re saying Daddy might have his baby boy whacked?”

  Guma studied his cigar. “Who knows?” he said. “A kid who hates your guts is going to end your happy millionaire life and get you sent off to the can? People get killed for a lot less. But I don’t thin
k the old man knows what Zachary is saying, so he’s probably safe until after the election.”

  Karp pondered the possibilities. “You know who the caller was? Maybe he has something more.”

  “No. He didn’t give a name. No Caller ID and it wasn’t traceable. I had a hunch it might have been Zachary’s psychologist, who is supposedly the only other person who knows about this. But I talked to the doc, with Zachary’s permission. He, of course, denied revealing ‘confidential information,’ and, well, the voice wasn’t the same.”

  “Psychologist?” Karp asked as the red flags went up in his head. Great, I can hear the “dirty politics” accusations now, all based on testimony from a nutcase.

  Guma looked up at the ceiling as if he’d suddenly discovered something unusual there. “Uh, yeah…forgot to tell you, but this is a ‘repressed memory’ thing.”

  Karp groaned again. Repressed memory was where someone buried—or repressed—the memory of traumatic events, only to “recover,” or recall, them later, usually with the help of a psychologist using hypnosis. It had become popular in the eighties, and he knew of cases in which defendants had been convicted on nothing more than the recovered memory of the accuser. However, it was notoriously unreliable. Instances had been found in which the accuser—usually someone with serious psychological problems that led to the psychologist’s couch in the first place—“recovered” memories of events that they had actually read about in newspapers or heard in long-ago conversations. There had even been cases in which the hypnotist, intentionally or unintentionally, had “planted” in the patient false memories, that upon waking, were remembered as real.

  From wide acceptance—by both prosecutors and defense lawyers, depending on which side the repressed memories helped—the science had since fallen into a gray area of the law. Anyway, it was a huge battle to get such testimony into evidence and usually only when backed up by corroborating evidence.

  For Karp, if the corroborating evidence wasn’t sufficiently compelling and independently establishing the defendant’s guilt, he wouldn’t consider offering the so-called repressed memory at trial. “I remember the Stavros case, somewhat,” he said, not wanting to rain on Guma’s parade, yet.

  “You should,” Guma replied. “It was page-one headline material for weeks. ‘Wealthy socialite disappears.’ ‘Banker husband investigated by police.’ ‘Police clear banker husband when socialite sighted in Buenos Aires.’ On and on and on.”

  “They ever find a body?” Karp asked hopefully. Without a body, the repressed memory hurdle became a wall topped with razor wire.

  Guma shook his head. “No. But I might know where to look.”

  Before Karp had a chance to ask where that might be, Mrs. Milquetost buzzed in on the intercom. “There’s a young man here to see you. Says he has an appointment, though I don’t see it anywhere on my—”

  “That’s okay,” Karp said. “This was spur of the moment, send him in.”

  A moment later, a tall young man in a black T-shirt and jeans—stunningly handsome despite the too-pale complexion, dark eye makeup, and a “sleeve” of tattoos that covered his entire right arm down to the wrist—walked in. His nearly coal black hair was short and formed into neat ringlets, and he had the sad, deep-set brown eyes of a poet.

  Even the air about him was melancholy, until he smiled, at which point the sun seemed to come in the office windows just a tad brighter. He stepped forward to shake Karp’s hand and then turned to Guma. “Hi, Mr. Guma,” he said. “I take it I’m in the right place.”

  Guma got up and shook the young man’s hand warmly, then led him over to a couch near Karp’s desk on which they both sat. “I know you’re nervous, but you can trust Mr. Karp. Despite being the district attorney, he’s an all-right guy. I just wanted him to hear your story from your mouth. As I told you, pursuing this would be very difficult.”

  “I’m sure,” Zachary said, the smile disappearing as he looked back at Karp. “My father’s a powerful man.”

  “Well, that may be true, but that’s not the issue right now,” Guma said. “Whoever sits in that chair over there is pretty powerful, too. There are certainly more important considerations, not the least of which is you would be testifying against your father. He’s your only family, right?”

  Zachary nodded. “Yeah, my mom was an only child and her parents died a long time ago…not long after she disappeared,” he said. “My dad’s a second-generation Greek immigrant. His family never wanted anything to do with me. In other words, there’s not much family to this family. Never was…. Now, where should I start?”

  3

  ROGER “BUTCH” KARP HEARD FULTON GROUSING THE MINUTE he got off the elevator on the fourth floor at Beth Israel Hospital and was glad it gave him something to smile about. Butch hated visiting hospitals, even a nice, modern facility like BI. Above all, he hated the smell of hospitals—the cleaning fluids that couldn’t disguise the stench of urine and blood and the cloying presence of death and disease.

  Ever since high school, he’d associated these smells with the pain his mother had been put through as she battled cancer. It didn’t matter that she’d died at home, there’d been too many trips to the hospital for tests and surgeries, too much watching her suffer as the doctors poked, prodded, and shook their heads with long mournful faces. Nothing can be done…. We’ll try to make her as comfortable as possible. Sorry, son.

  Nor did it matter that atop the list of Karp’s happiest moments had been his presence at the births of his three children: Lucy, the eldest, and the twins, Isaac and Giancarlo. He still hated hospitals.

  Yet he had to laugh as he drew closer to Fulton’s room from which there came the sound of objects crashing to the floor and the detective bellowing at the top of his lungs. “I don’t need nobody’s help to take a piss, young lady. Now, if you’ll just stand aside and hand me the walker, I’ll manage to drain the tank just fine on my own.”

  A young female voice argued back. “Now, Mr. Fulton, you aren’t supposed to get out of bed without two nurses here to assist you,” she said. “I’m not big enough to support you by myself if you fell. But if you’ll just wait a moment, I’ll call for another nurse. Or you can use the bottle we’ve provided next to your bed.”

  “Ah, for Christ’s sake, I just want to take a whiz in a toilet without a couple of women watching…”

  Karp entered the room and saw Fulton perched on the edge of the hospital bed, waving his outstretched arms at a pretty little blond nurse who stood between him and an aluminum walker. Fulton looked up at the intruder with a scowl, but his expression changed when he saw it was Karp.

  “Butch! Just the man I wanted to see,” Fulton said. “Now, nurse, my friend Butch here will do just fine with piss duty. As you can see, he’s a big strapping fellow; he’ll save me if I fall in and begin to drown. Now, hand me the walker.”

  The nurse—Nancy Hull, if her name tag was accurate—looked at Karp dubiously. But she had to admit that the visitor was a big man—six foot five or so, she guessed—and looked like he worked out. She liked the way he was smiling at her with his curiously almond-shaped eyes which, she noted, were gray and flecked with gold. Nurse Nancy turned and handed the walker to Fulton, who practically jumped out of bed.

  Karp quickly realized that the nurse’s concerns were not without merit. His friend nearly toppled over to the side and would have fallen except that Karp reached out to steady him.

  “Thanks,” Fulton said, grimacing in pain from having tweaked a knee catching himself. “I’ve got it from here, if you’d kindly get the bathroom door.”

  Karp reached for the handle and held the door open. Fulton half walked and half dragged himself into the bathroom with Nurse Nancy positioned on the other side, looking as if she was prepared to dive under the big man to break his fall if necessary.

  “Out,” Fulton demanded as he reached the toilet.

  “But—” Nurse Nancy began to complain.

  “Out. Nonnegotiable. Vamoose!
Butch can stay if it makes you feel any better, but you have to scram…. Please.”

  The nurse stood back with a sniff and shut the door. Satisfied that his privacy was not going to be invaded, Fulton positioned the walker so that he could relieve himself. “They’re saying I can go home in the next day or two,” he grumbled back at Karp. “But I have to stay off my legs for a few weeks, then gradually rehab back into shape. I can’t wait. The worst thing about this place is all these people treating me like a child. A big, helpless child. I just want to get back to work and hopefully someday run into the mo’fo who did this.”

  Karp listened patiently to the rant, which he’d heard since shortly after that terrible day. A farmer in upstate New York, out trying to discover what all the black smoke over by the highway was about, discovered the massacre. Fulton had been found lying with his head on the body of a murdered child, passed out due to loss of blood and shock. His survival had been touch and go for a bit, and there’d been concern about brain damage from the blood loss. But he’d pulled through with his wife, Helen, at his side, and there appeared to be nothing physically wrong with him other than the damage done to his knees.

  The surgeons had been able to repair one knee with the expectation that it would fully recover with physical therapy. You were lucky, the surgeon told him. The bullet damaged a ligament and nicked a pretty major blood vessel, but it didn’t hit the bone. However, the joint in the second knee had been destroyed, requiring a total knee replacement and the honest assessment, You may never walk quite normally again. There was damage to the perineal nerve that affects how you raise and lower your foot—a condition known as “drop foot” may result, as well as a general loss of strength.