Counterplay

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Karp shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think that will be necessary. He really doesn’t like to stay indoors any longer than he has to.”

  Mrs. Milquetost was still muttering about “lax security” when Gilbert Murrow walked in a minute later and wrinkled his nose. “What is that smell?” he asked. “The garbage union on strike again?”

  “One of Mr. Karp’s friends came calling unannounced,” Mrs. Milquetost complained. The stench of Edward Treacher had a staying power that overwhelmed air fresheners and defied open windows.

  Karp returned to his office and walked back to his desk, followed by Murrow. He looked down at the campaign finance papers and slumped into the seat, feeling the first storm clouds of a headache approaching. “Do I really need to know all this?” he complained. “Isn’t this why I pay you?”

  “Yes and no,” Murrow replied, sitting down in the chair across from him and whipping out a PalmPilot day planner with the flourish of a matador drawing his sword from its scabbard. He began reading off the various upcoming speaking engagements, ribbon cuttings, fund-raising events, and black-tie parties Karp was expected to attend.

  The reluctant candidate put his hands to his head, groaned, and said something disparaging about Murrow’s immediate ancestry. Sometimes Karp wondered if the brain damage of running for political office was worth getting elected. In fact, he often wondered why he wanted to be the district attorney of New York.

  Fighting crime on the island of Manhattan was like building sand castles against an incoming tide, what with some 600 murders, 1,700 rapes, 27,000 robberies, and 34,000 aggravated assaults, plus a deluge of other felonies in any one year. But that wasn’t the bad part; he enjoyed putting criminals away and standing up for the victims.

  No, the onerous part of being the district attorney was putting up with an exploitative and sensationalizing media and dealing with a myriad of special-interest groups, all of whom thought they were being ignored, or discriminated against, or deserved more, and all of whom knew that they could do his job better than he could. He was also tired of watching incompetent judges and ethically challenged lawyers make a mockery of the system.

  More than any of that, though, he worried about the impact on his family. He’d made plenty of enemies over the years, some of whom had tried to get back at him by going after his wife and the kids. Not that Marlene hadn’t brought some of the violence on herself or them, but as long as he remained The Man, they would always be a potential target.

  Maybe it’s time to let someone else carry the ball, he thought, leave the city and find some small town and practice law. Maybe Marlene would consider practicing again. Karp and Ciampi, LLC, has a nice ring to it.

  Yeah, right, said the little voice that seemed to have camped out in his cerebellum of late. Butch Karp, the lion of New York County’s DAO, going to hang his shingle in some little place in the sticks and take on divorce and shoplifting cases. Your ego couldn’t handle it.

  That’s not fair, he responded. This has nothing to do with my ego. I’m doing this to return the office to the integrity and respect it had under the Old Man. Somebody has to keep building sand castles or the tide will have nothing to slow it down.

  Liar, said the voice. That may be part of it, but face it, you’re as competitive as ever. You want to WIN this election. You just don’t like the grunt work.

  “I want to win this election because it’s important for the public,” Karp said before realizing he was now speaking aloud.

  “I know, I know,” Murrow said, putting up his hands in mock surrender, like he did every time the boss started grousing. “The polls are looking good, too, but we’ve got to continue to counter Rachman’s ad campaign with personal appearances. That’s where you shine.”

  Murrow furrowed his brow, a very studied move that he’d practiced thousands of times in front of a mirror back in law school. “I wonder where she’s getting all that money?” he mused. “Her own party seems barely lukewarm to her candidacy.”

  Karp cringed at the mention of the former head of his sexual assault unit. “She should be in prison, not running for political office,” he growled. “But there’s plenty of people out there who would prefer her to me, and some of them have pretty deep pockets.”

  “Yeah, criminals,” Murrow said. “I still can’t believe the AG’s decision.”

  Rachel Rachman, who years earlier had taken Marlene’s place as the head of the sexual assault unit, had gone off the deep end in January and been caught trying to withhold exculpatory evidence from the defense in two rape cases, as well as preparing to put a witness on the stand who she knew had lied to the police. She’d always been something of a crusader—a virulently effective trial lawyer when it came to prosecuting rapists. But somewhere along the line, she’d decided that all men were rapists and all female complainants honest…justice and the rules be damned.

  He’d had to recuse his office from prosecuting her but had turned over the evidence to the New York Attorney General and asked him to seek an indictment for obstruction of justice, false imprisonment, and withholding evidence in a criminal case. He’d been both surprised and disgusted when the AG declined to prosecute, saying that Rachman’s action could have been interpreted as carrying out the job she’d been hired to do, albeit unethically, but it didn’t rise to the level of criminal intent. The AG suggested that it was a matter for the state bar association, not the courts.

  Seething, Karp had then tried to have Rachman disbarred. But again, he’d been stymied unexpectedly when the bar association would go no further than send his former employee a letter of reprimand. He sensed a rat.

  The whole thing had been kept hush-hush from the public. Because the AG declined to file criminal charges, and the bar association letter was considered confidential, Karp’s office—in the form of Murrow, who would have loved to expound on Rachman’s short-comings—was not free to comment on the reasons for her leaving the DAO.

  Murrow’s girlfriend, the ubiquitous journalist, Ariadne Stupenagel, had done her best to get to the bottom of the scandal in the DA’s office. Even to the extent of promising Murrow sexual experiences almost unheard of, and possibly illegal, in the civilized world. But he’d refused to crack, and she’d otherwise run into a stone wall as far as official comment.

  However, she had written a story noting that Rachman had been dismissed shortly after two of her sexual assault cases had fallen apart for unknown reasons. One of the complainants in the case, a young woman named Sarah Ryder, who’d accused her professor of Russian literature at NYU of drugging and raping her, turned out to be a real nutcase. In fact, she’d stabbed Karp’s appellate chief, Harry Kipman, in the shoulder with a pair of scissors.

  In both sexual assault cases that Rachman mishandled, the accused had been set free, the charges dismissed by Karp. And now corporation counsel, the city’s attorney, was holding his breath, waiting for the expected lawsuits.

  However, Rachman had countered by taking advantage of Karp’s refusal to get into a war of words in the press. She’d announced her candidacy for the district attorney’s seat and then gone on the attack. Her dismissal, she told her friends in the press, was due to “dirty politics.” She claimed that she’d informed Karp that she intended to run for the office and her termination had been an act of revenge because her boss felt “betrayed.”

  When questioned about the cases noted in Stupenagel’s story, Rachman angrily denied that there was anything materially wrong with them. She said she would have preferred “going forward and letting the juries decide on guilt or innocence. Not some arbitrary decision made by a male district attorney who can’t seem to understand the trauma that women go through in a sexual assault that might leave them psychologically precarious.”

  Karp had ignored the attacks and insisted that Murrow and the others working on his campaign do the same. He believed that the public was bright enough to understand that Rachman was blowing smoke.

  Still, he had to admit tha
t her campaign was gaining ground. She had a long ways to go to challenge his position in the polls, but she was outspending him four-to-one with television, radio, and print ads. She’d even assembled a small group of former rape victims whose attackers she had put behind bars to give testimonials to the press that she was their “champion” while Karp was nothing more than a figurehead.

  Murrow had complained bitterly that he was hobbled by Karp’s refusal to get into negative politics. “I don’t like dirty politics, either,” he griped. “But it’s the way things are done these days. If someone hits you, people want to see you hit back. Otherwise, you’re a big wuss.”

  “A wuss?” Karp said. “Well, I guess I’ve been called worse.”

  “And still are,” Murrow said. “We’re taking more ‘KKKarp’ hits for the Coney Island Four case.” He handed Karp a copy of the New York Post that had a huge headline over a photograph of flamboyant, race-baiting black attorney Hugh Louis that read: New York DA a Racist?

  Karp barely glanced at the paper before tossing it into his wastepaper basket. The so-called Coney Island Four was a gang of young black men who’d brutally raped and almost killed a young woman who’d been jogging along Coney Island’s Brighton Beach one morning more than a decade earlier. They’d been serving time when a vile sex offender named Enrique Villalobos came forward to claim that he’d been the only one to assault the woman. Their attorney, Louis, had immediately demanded that they be exonerated and released from prison, and the King’s County DA had immediately capitulated. Louis had then sued the city of New York and NYPD for what he called a “racially motivated railroading” of his clients by overzealous prosecutors.

  Although it wasn’t part of his job description, Karp had taken on the case at the request of the city’s new mayor, Michael Denton, who didn’t trust the corporation counsel, the city’s attorney at the time. At trial, Karp had proved that the original prosecution had been a good one and that, in fact, Villalobos had been forced by the gang of rapists into testifying otherwise.

  Karp considered the trial a win, although justice had been meted out in an unusually lethal manner. In garish courtroom cross-examination, Karp forced Villalobos to recant his “confession.” The leader of the gang, Jayshon Sykes, had than seized a court officer’s gun and killed Villalobos. The uncommon fireworks ended when the rape victim shot and killed Sykes.

  Hugh Louis was arrested for his part in the planning of the schemes and charged with capital murder among other major felonies. He would be going to trial later that fall, and was now claiming again that Karp’s defense of the city had been racially motivated.

  It is immaterial that my client, who is no longer here to defend himself, may or may not have committed a crime, the former dapper Hugh Louis, now dressed in his jailhouse jumpsuit, ranted to the press from the Tombs dayroom. The big picture here—are you with me—is that the city called in its “top gun,” a man who has been accused before of racist acts, because my clients were African-American, and is now after me because—although I was duped by my clients—I am African-American. It is another example of The Man sending a message to people of color, “Do not attempt to seek justice or we will silence you one way or the other.” Well, no one silences Hugh Louis.

  When an incensed Murrow read the quote to Karp from the Times and demanded that they issue a press release to counter it, Karp told him to drop it. I think the public sees through this crap. I’m not going to dignify it by responding every time Louis, or Rachman, or anybody else wants to play the race or gender or religion or politics card.

  Murrow winced at the mention of Rachman. As he’d predicted, when Guma had convinced Karp that he had enough to reopen the Stavros case, a decision that was vindicated when the grand jury indicted Emil, she’d howled with outrage. She’d blasted Karp, saying he was showing his true colors by resorting to Tammany Hall politics to stay in power.

  Stavros’s attorney had, of course, joined the chorus. The attorney, Bryce Anderson, a glib, frequent commentator on legal issues for CNN, was beside himself with indignation at a hastily called press conference on the steps of the Criminal Courts building.

  This is an absolute outrage, he huffed. It’s obviously a shameless attempt by the district attorney to pull out old rumors to embarrass and damage a man who opposes him politically. It’s vengeance, pure and simple, for all the funds that are pouring into his opponent’s war chest, and he’s starting to feel the pinch in the polls. Mrs. Stavros abandoned her family fourteen years ago, at which time Mr. Stavros was completely exonerated of any wrongdoing. Should this farce be allowed to continue, we will fight these charges with every ounce of our energy, and when we are victorious, we will work to make sure that this new “Boss Tweed” is chased from office by the good people of New York City.

  Murrow had wanted to go on the attack then, just as he did now. But Karp wouldn’t let him answer Rachman or Anderson, other than a brief comment: A duly formed grand jury heard the evidence and determined that probable cause existed to warrant the charges against Mr. Stavros. We will reserve further comment for the courtroom. Nor would he let Murrow go off now. “If I can’t run on my record and what I have to say, then I don’t want to win anyway.”

  “Well, then, that means you agree to all these appearances,” Murrow said.

  It was Karp’s turn to hold up his hands. “You win, Gilbert,” he said. “As long as it doesn’t interfere with doing the job or cut into all of my family time.”

  “That doesn’t leave much,” Murrow groused. “I think you’re getting stretched pretty thin.”

  Karp downplayed the comment but thought: He’s right. I am feeling a little stretched. It wasn’t just the day-to-day stuff of running the District Attorney’s Office, either. The hunt for Andrew Kane and his accomplices was running into dead ends, according to the almost daily reports he got from Jaxon. Nor was there much to indicate what Kane was up to beyond revenge. Apparently, there’s been an increase in internet chatter that seems to indicate that something’s up, Jaxon said. And the NSA’s “man on the inside” is still trying to get close. In the meantime, Ellis said to tell you he’s “got your back.”

  Karp had rolled his eyes at that one. It was almost a game now trying to figure out who among the hundreds of people walking the sidewalks around Crosby and Grand every hour were really federal agents assigned to protect him and his family. Was it the street workers who’d showed up one morning but didn’t seem to do much except pop in and out of a manhole down the block? Or was it the old couple he’d never seen before walking their miniature poodle? You don’t like this guy Ellis much, do you? Karp said to Jaxon the last time they talked.

  The telephone was silent for a moment before Jaxon spoke again. It’s not that I like or don’t like him. I mean, the guy’s obviously a pro. He’s just not much of a team player, if you know what I mean, or maybe he doesn’t see me as being on his team. But I might just be grousing about playing second fiddle in my own neck of the woods.

  Karp tried not to dwell on Andrew Kane and what he might be up to, especially as it affected his family. But it was pretty hard to entirely ignore a homicidal maniac who has promised to wipe your DNA from the planet.

  So he’d tried to turn the negative into a positive by focusing on spending quality time with his family, in particular Marlene. Their marriage had survived a few recent rocky patches, but was still challenged by recent events. If it wasn’t Kane, then she was dwelling on the January death of her mother and the increasing mental deterioration of her father. So he’d taken to sending the kids out to a movie or some other activity—with a police escort—so that he and Marlene could spend more time together just necking on the couch or discussing the issues of the day. They’d even managed a couple of dinners out, which she seemed to appreciate, especially when she’d spent the day dealing with her father.

  Meanwhile, Lucy was living in New Mexico, but there was nothing much he could do about that. He liked her boyfriend, the cowboy Ned Blanchet, who�
�d proved himself more than competent in tight situations, and John Jojola, the Indian police chief of the Taos Pueblo, was also out there keeping an eye on them.

  Somehow, he’d even found more time to spend with the twins. Zak and Giancarlo were studying for their bar mitzvah, which unfortunately had just been scheduled for late October, right before the election. Karp was still teaching classes at the behest of the young rabbi at their synagogue for those taking their bar mitzvah (and even a few girls studying for their bat mitzvah). That ate up another night of the week.

  With all that attention to the family and the job, he knew he wasn’t being fair to Murrow, who’d been working his butt off on the campaign. “I’ll try to pass off some of this office stuff so that I can attend as much as I can,” Karp told his assistant.

  Karp saw that the next item on Murrow’s yellow pad was “Television Ads” for which he had a particular aversion, but was saved by the buzzing of the intercom. He reached forward and punched the answer button. “Yes, Mrs. Milquetost.”

  “There’s a Mr. Espey Jaxon on the line for you,” she said. “He says he’s calling from California and that it’s urgent.”

  Karp felt his stomach muscles tighten. I believe a harbinger of bad tidings will soon arrive from California…“Put him through, please,” he said, hitting another button to engage the speaker-phone.

  “Hello, Espey, you taking up surfing?” he asked, leaning back in his chair and wishing the conversation would remain as light.

  “I wish,” Jaxon replied. “Can I talk freely?”

  Karp glanced at Murrow who asked with sign language if he should leave. But Karp shook his head. “Gilbert Murrow is here, if that’s okay,” he said. “I’d trust him with my life.” He winked at his aide who blushed and smiled.

  “Yeah, sure, I know Mr. Murrow…hi, Gilbert…. Anyway, I’m afraid I have some bad news. Fey’s been murdered.”

  Karp knew his jaw was hanging open, hopefully not as far as Murrow’s, but he couldn’t help it. He felt suddenly prescient in that he knew the information was only going to get worse. “When?” he asked, not sure why that was important at this point.