So here he was, having, to his shame, put absolutely everything out of his mind except the business at hand. The first thing he'd done, even before leaving for work, was to get in touch with Dr. M.K. Shah, the assistant medical examiner who had done the autopsy on the victim and testified about it during the prosecution's case in chief. Dr. Shah was a little surprised to have the chief assistant district attorney call him at his home at eight on a Monday morning, to ask him about an incidental wound in an autopsy he'd done months ago. He assured the gentleman from the DA that the wound to that particular victim's left arm was of no importance in the demise of the victim, having severed no major blood vessels. Yes, he recalled it well, because it was the first bullet he had recovered- it had smashed the humerus and lodged under the collar bone, painful, yes, damaging, yes, but not contributing to the death…
That was not, however, what Karp wanted to know. When Dr. Shah finally understood what the question was, and that the DA was making no criticism at all of the way he had handled the autopsy or testified at the grand jury and at the trial, he genially confirmed Karp's surmise and announced himself ready to take the stand again at a moment's notice to establish the fact in open court.
In that court, the first business was Karp's cross-examination of Detective Eric Gerber. It was brief.
"Detective Gerber, you've just testified that you shot the victim, Mr. Onabajo, because you thought he was about to overpower your partner, Detective Nixon, and take his weapon, and what I'd like to hear from you is how you knew that."
"He was shouting at me: 'Eric, he's got my gun!' "
" 'Eric he's got my gun,' a cry for aid, yes, but from where you were standing, you couldn't actually see that struggle, could you?"
"No, the suspect was in the way. He had Detective Nixon locked up."
"Locked up? Locked up, how?"
Gerber's right hand went to the collar of his jacket and gripped it. "He had him by the collar. Detective Nixon was wearing a leather jacket, and the guy had a bunch of it in his fist. He couldn't pull away."
"I see. Now in demonstrating that, we see you're using your right hand. But Mr. Onabajo was using his left hand, of course. Is that correct? He was holding your partner's jacket with his left hand?"
"Right, his left."
There was a humorous murmur at this. The judge scowled it down.
Karp smiled, too. "So, you are absolutely positive that while he contested for Detective Nixon's weapon with his right hand, he was holding tight to that officer's leather jacket with his left hand, locking him in, as you say."
"Yes."
"From where you stood, did it appear to be a powerful grip?"
"Well, yes, the jacket, the leather, was all bunched up."
"Detective Nixon was not pushing him away, was he, or using his hands to pry loose that powerful grip, was he?"
"No, he wasn't."
"Why was that?"
"Because he was using both hands to try to keep his weapon away from the suspect."
"Away from the victim, yes. But he was able to fire, was he not? Two shots?"
"Yes."
"But these shots did not make the victim release his powerful grip, did they?"
"No. Not that I could determine at that time."
"And that's why you fired five shots from your pistol, to get him off your partner?"
"Yes."
"Thank you, Detective. Nothing further, Your Honor."
Karp caught the surprised look that passed across Hrcany's face. Karp knew he hadn't expected this. He had expected a lot of questions about the five fatal shots from Gerber's gun, which Hrcany, in his direct questioning, had been at great pains to demonstrate were all necessary to subdue a desperate criminal clawing at an officer's weapon.
***
Marlene stirs. The dog is hungry. Lucy has taken care of everything else, but Gog will accept food only from her own hand, as he has been trained to do. So she leaves the rocker and pours kibble and two cans of beef liver dog food into his trough. She eats a banana and pours out some of the coffee Lucy made that morning. The daughter is out with the boys. Marlene doesn't know where, except that they are away from her and therefore safer than they would be if she had them all on her knee. She sips the stale coffee, not tasting it, and watches the dog eat. The dog tried to tell her about the bomb, and she hadn't listened to him. Gog was bomb trained, Magog was not. Marlene should have known why Gog was upset, but she was too drunk. She checked her own truck but not Raney's sedan. So that was her fault, too.
She finds herself in the room she used to use as an office, a bright room that occupies the end of the loft that looks out on Crosby Street. In former days it had been a jungle of house plants, but now only one brave philodendron survives. She believes that Giancarlo still waters it. It would be the sort of thing he does. She had given all the other plants away, or allowed them to wither.
This is automatic pilot, she thinks, the simulacrum of an active life. She is aware that if she stays in her rocker and never speaks to anyone and never acknowledges anyone speaking to her, her family will call in medical help, and she will find herself in a looney bin, with kindly people trying to help her out of her depression. In fact, she is not depressed. She is in a state perfectly suitable for a woman who has lived a life of willful violence and is now suffering the moral consequences thereof. How else should she be feeling but bereft, miserable, guilty? She knows that mental health professionals do not think in such terms, which is one reason she wants to stay out of their hands. Lucy understands this, but Karp does not, and Karp will be in charge if she has what they will call a breakdown. So she is careful not to have one. If the authorities still existed that once dealt with people like her, the kind that used to burn at stakes, or immur in towers, then she might seek that sort of professional help, but no kindly people, please. Therefore she goes to work.
On the agenda today is Cherry Newcombe. Marlene has put some of Paul Agnelli's money on the street. She has a wide acquaintanceship among the demimonde of lower Manhattan. She knows people who will watch other people for a fee, and ask questions in ways that practically insure that they will be answered truthfully. So she has learned that fifteen-year-old Cherry has recently come into some money, serious money, and that she has clothed herself in splendor, having bought a number of tiny, shiny garments suitable for evening wear, plus a remarkable number of expensive shoes, some gold jewelry, and the hire of a car to take her around to the clubs. Other moneys have been spent on her boyfriend, Gambrell, twenty-two, who is apparently multiply guilty of the crime for which Paul Agnelli has been brought before the bar of justice, to wit, porking Ms. Newcombe, an underage female, but no one seems to be after Gambrell. Even more of this new cash has gone, as far as Marlene's people can determine, to a man called Carter "Smoke" Belknap, a dealer in cocaine. Belknap's usual place of business is a parking lot on Essex at Delancey, next to a club called Boot Kamp, which is, not incidentally, a favorite of Cherry Newcombe's.
Marlene now packs a nylon bag with the implements she will need for the evening's work: a black cotton jumpsuit, black Converse high-tops, a silk balaclava, nylon rope, plastic cable ties, duct tape, and a nine-millimeter Beretta 92FS semi-automatic pistol, fitted with a Jarvis threaded barrel. Marlene had sworn never to use a gun again, but she now construed that oath to mean never use one as an adjunct to some legal, professional activity. What she was about to do was a crime. And a crime in itself was the last item she tossed into the bag, a SRT Matrix sound suppressor, also called a can silencer, the ownership of which in the state of New York is a felony.
She takes this bag, the dog lead, and Gog the dog and leaves her home. It is a long time until dark, but she wants to visit Raney and tell him what happened. She announces this mission to the dog and adds, "Maybe he'll shoot me. Save everyone a lot of trouble." Her voice sounds strange to her ear, hoarse, as if still suffering from the effects of the last significant noise she can recall making, the scream that shot from her throat
when the bomb went off. The dog says nothing, as he has learned not to indulge her in these moods. Besides, he knows she is immortal, as the gods must be if the world is to make sense.
***
Lucy took the twins to Washington Square. This time they did not complain that they were not babies and could wander the city streets at will. Lucy foiled Zak's attempt to slip out with a six-inch chef knife stuck in his waistband under his shirt, and was deaf to his arguments that they required weaponry of some kind, preferably a gun. At the park, Giancarlo unlimbered his accordion and began to play "Brokenhearted I'll Wander," a tune suitable for their collective mood. Lucy sat on the bench next to Giancarlo; Zak took up a position at some distance, where he could scan the crowd for danger and call in air strikes. She pulled a Post from a wastebasket. The Raney murder was still front page, fed by the anastomosing story about the fantastic escape of the killer Felix Tighe from Auburn Prison, his association with the terrorist chieftain ibn-Salemeh, the possibility that Felix was the Manbomber, that he had murdered his ex-wife and her child and now the wife of the man who had arrested him fifteen years ago. There was a big picture of Felix, as he had looked at the time of his arrest, and a more recent one from the prison.
"What's wrong?" said Giancarlo, after his song was done.
"Nothing."
"Yes, there is. You said, 'Oh, good Christ! Oh, Jesus!' under your breath when I was playing."
"It's fine, Giancarlo, I just thought of something I had to do. Play on!"
He shrugged and did. People paused in their walking by, and a number stayed to listen, so sweet and sad was the music. Soon afterward, a weedy teenager with a tin whistle arrived, and a bearded man in his mid-twenties came and opened his violin case and began to play, and then a pretty young woman with a Gaelic drum, a bohdran, and the four of them started in on "The Heather Breeze," as if they had been playing together forever. It was music squeezed from the rock of misery, designed over the centuries to make you forget the cruelties of life for the space of a song.
Hours passed in this way. They ate lunch from the cancer wagons. Lucy checked in with her father, and with her mother, getting neither, but leaving messages. When work let out, more musicians came by and they played the sun down. Someone mentioned an open mike night at a coffeehouse on Christopher and so they all trooped over there, Lucy being happy enough to stay in the safety of the crowd. Giancarlo formed a band, with four people who were all twice as old as he was, to be called Blind Boy Please Help. They made forty-eight dollars. The thought passed through Lucy's mind that it would be very pleasant to wander the world in this way, with her two brothers, playing innocent music and letting events drift by. She looked at Zak while she was thinking this, and got a bright smile, an unusual sight on that face, and she knew that he had been thinking just that, too. Her cell phone buzzed; she spoke briefly into it and switched off.
"Who was that?" Zak asked.
"I have to meet a guy in about an hour."
"A boyfriend?"
"Uh-huh. Leo DiCaprio. He saw me in the street and fell in love. He wants to marry me, but I don't know… I don't want to be, like, spoiled."
"He's a jerk, and he's probably about five-three. No, really, who?"
"A guy I want watching our backs," she said and would say no more.
***
Karp could see that Roland was as rattled as he ever got, which was not much. He seemed a little hesitant with his next and final witness, the powerfully gripped other detective, Frank Nixon. Nixon was wearing glasses today, rimless ones, instead of his usual contact lenses. His dark blond hair was swept back, combed close against his skull with water like an altar boy's, and he had a shirt on that was a size too big around the collar, making him look like the guy on the beach who got sand kicked in his face. The signal here: a mild and unthreatening fellow. He had a sharp high-cheeked face built around a ski nose and a set of pale, smart blue eyes.
Roland spent a good deal of time on the first moments of the altercation, when the victim allegedly went for the detective's weapon. Karp understood that he was doing this because Karp had focused his questioning of Gerber on those moments, and that meant that Karp thought they were vulnerable, that Karp would concentrate on those moments during his summation. He would ask the jury if it were reasonable that a man shot several times could hang on with a powerful grip. Roland meant to fix in the jury's collective mind that it was reasonable, that it did happen, and that two cops were swearing that it happened in just that way.
It was a simple trap and Roland was walking, nay running, into it, singing tra-la-la. When the direct questioning of Detective Nixon was completed, therefore, all Karp's work had been done for him by the opposition, which is every litigator's highest hope. Karp now rose and paused. He looked at the witness; he looked at the judge and the jury. From the beginning of this trial, from the moment it had become known that the defense was going to place the defendants on the stand, and expose them to cross-examination, all the speculation in the press had been that this examination would make or break the trial. And when the word got out that Karp was taking the case, they went into a frenzy of anticipation, for Karp was the best cross-examiner in the recent history of the DA. He had just demonstrated this by his demolition of Hugo Selwyn, the ballistics expert, and everyone was looking forward to dramatic fireworks. It was going to be like on TV.
"I have no questions for this witness, Your Honor," Karp said, and the courtroom gasped and burbled with noise, requiring the judge to wield his gavel and threaten to clear. When order had been restored, Roland announced that the defense's case was concluded. Higbee's eyes flicked to Karp's, who said, "Your Honor, may we approach the bench?"
The judge dismissed the jury for five minutes. When the two counsels stood beneath the presidium, Karp said, "We have a rebuttal case, Your Honor, and since it's closing on three thirty, I would suggest carrying it over until tomorrow."
Roland said, "Your Honor, we'd like an offer of proof here. It's inconceivable to me that the state could rebut the defense case except by a repetition of previous material."
"Your Honor, I believe I know my responsibilities under the rules," Karp replied. "Our rebuttal case will include new material impeaching the defendants' testimony, as required."
It was an easy call. The judge brought the jury back in, told them what was going on, and what a rebuttal was, and dismissed them for the day. Reporters mobbed both attorneys outside the courtroom. They asked Karp why he hadn't cross-examined. They asked if he was throwing the case. If he was throwing the case because the cops were white and victim was black. Or Muslim. Karp brushed by them silently, as he always did. The more perspicacious among them noted that he was smiling happily, and wondered why. The reporters had Roland Hrcany, however, who loved to talk with the press, and he supplied enough information for two. He was glad to explain that the reason that Karp had not cross-examined was that the direct had been done with such skill, and the story was so obviously true, that any cross would have been otiose and harassing, and that's why Karp, for whom he had the greatest respect, had wisely declined to pursue it.
***
The street outside of Raney's house is full of parked cars when Marlene pulls up, both private and police vehicles. She must park a block away and walk back. As she does, she passes men she recognizes from the cops. They recognize her, too, and many give her hard looks, for most of them think that she should be wearing an orange jumpsuit up at Bedford instead of walking free on the streets.
Inside the house it is crowded, hot, and noisy with voices and music and the clink of glass against glass, for they are waking Nora Raney in the grand old style. Jim Raney is a famous and popular cop and his wife was a charmer. There is an open bar, much patronized. The place smells of many colognes, whiskey, smoke, and beer. Marlene steers her way through beefy men and hard-faced women with short hair (none of whom resemble the lovely policewomen of televisionland), all with drinks in their hands. Raney is on the couch in just the plac
e he was sitting when his wife grabbed up the keys and went out to move his car. A woman who shares his bright Irish good looks sits next to him on the couch and an older woman sits on the other side, dabbing her eyes: the sister and the mother. In an armchair nearby, a red-eyed, red-haired woman dandles little Meghan. Nora's sister over from Ireland, Marlene guesses.
She meets Raney's eyes, which are red-rimmed, too, as if he had been swimming in chlorinated water. He is very pale, the freckles stand out on his forehead. His hands are wrapped in bandages. He sees her and makes a motion of his head, of his eyes. She understands and leaves. The backyard is empty, the Weber grill sits where it sat on the night of the explosion, a burger lies mummified on the grate. Marlene lights a cigarette and wonders again why she has stopped drinking.
After a few minutes, Raney comes out. "Give me one of those," he says.
She pulls out a Marlboro, lights it, and raises it to his mouth. It is intimate without being sexy. They are comrades of a special type.
"It's a good wake," she observes when half the cigarette has vanished.
"Yeah, pity Nora couldn't come. She always said that. 'Pity old O'Hara couldn't come.' At the guy's wake. Are you going to ask me how I feel?"
"No. I believe I can guess. I wanted to tell you…" No, when it came down to saying the words she couldn't, not about the dog and it being all her fault. There was no point to it. It was self-immolating self-indulgence. "… how sorry I am. I liked her."
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