Resolved kac-15

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  That was wrong. Felix saw the gun in his hand and the flash and the crack of the bullet over his shoulder. The kid kept the gun pointed at Felix, but nothing happened. The kid looked at the gun, puzzled. A jam. He yanked at the slide. Felix started to move.

  In the prison yard there had been any number of debates about what to do if someone was trying to kill you. Jimmy Hoffa was often quoted- charge a gun, flee a knife- after which someone would always say, "Yeah, and look where he is now." But Felix had always thought that was good advice, if you couldn't instantly duck behind cover and get to a car. The thing was, you couldn't outrun a bullet, and you had to figure that a target closing on the shooter would do a lot more to mess up his aim than one running away, where the guy could get into position and squeeze off shot after shot. And if you did have to take a bullet, it was better to be on top of the guy, rather than ten feet away, where he could fill you with holes at his leisure and you couldn't do shit back to him. If the guy was a pro, you were probably dead anyway, but you had to figure a small chance was better than no chance at all. This kid was definitely not a pro.

  The Arab kid cleared his jam and brought his pistol up, just a little too late. Felix was on him, knocking his gun arm aside with his left and going in low with the knife. The kid screamed and fell off the blade onto his knees, trying to hold his belly closed and mumbling something in Arabic. Felix stepped behind him quickly and slashed his throat.

  Lights flicked on in the windows of the apartment across the street. A car stopped on the avenue and a man stepped onto the curb. Felix heard a woman scream and he saw the man on the curb take a cell phone out of his pocket. Felix knew what number he was dialing. There was, naturally, nothing but newspapers in the shopping bag. He ran for the shadows, toward the river.

  At Eleventh, he passed a storefront belonging to a glass company and examined himself in a mirror hanging there. He had been wearing black clothes, so that was all right if he got rid of them soon, but there was blood on his hands and face. He cleaned the knife handle and dropped the knife into a sewer, went into a dark saloon on Twelfth and washed his hands and face, then headed back to his hotel.

  There were two police cars parked in front of the hotel, and several uniformed officers on the pavement at the main entrance. Felix was stunned. How did they know? Or maybe it had nothing to do with him, maybe he could just breeze by. No, too dangerous. No one looked at your face in a big commercial hotel, but if for some reason they had already associated him with that dead Arab, like maybe he had a note-"Meet Felix Tighe"- in his pocket, that could trigger this. No, that was crazy, the Arabs didn't know he was there. Or maybe they did. Maybe Rashid had dropped a dime on him, when the kid hadn't shot him. But no, that would mean the Arab in Auburn would be screwed…

  No, fuck the Arabs, the Arabs couldn't have… but maybe some clerk had recognized him from the pictures they had in all the papers, on the TV, that Most Wanted program, he'd just made that this week. In any case, he knew he was sweating bullets, and he knew that cops could smell it on you, the fear, and he couldn't do it, he couldn't stand to bluff his way past. He couldn't think anymore, and he was getting close, he couldn't just spin around and run, that would have them on him in a second.

  So he ducked into a steak house, and asked the cashier where Radio City was and then stepped out in the opposite direction from the hotel entrance. He walked over to Times Square, bought a nylon duffel, an eight-inch hunting knife, and a change of clothing: jeans, T-shirt, cheap sneakers, work gloves, a raincoat, and a wide-brimmed bush hat. He changed into these in the men's room of the clothing store, tossed the bloody clothes into a trash can, and headed west again. He couldn't take the chance of staying in a fleabag; that would be just where the cops were likely to look. He would have to drop out altogether, to go underground.

  Fortunately, from his chasing after the Karp girl, he now knew something about the underground, about places cops hardly ever went. As he walked again toward the Hudson, he was conscious of a feeling he had not had in a while, the feeling of eyes upon him, rational paranoia. He found he didn't like it. He had loved being dead, and now his face was all over town. He was probably the most wanted man in New York at the moment. How to render himself invisible again? As long as his face was unknown, he'd been invisible as a uniformed workingman, and invisible in tourist gear. That wouldn't work anymore. He had to disappear, he had to become someone else, someone everyone saw but didn't look at. His memory threw up a few candidates, and one in particular, who had the added advantage of having some kind of screwy relationship with Lucy Karp.

  Felix dry-swallowed another Dexedrine capsule to keep his brain working in the necessary high gear. The new plan gelled in his mind, giving him a little jolt of satisfaction. He was starting to feel on top of things once more. This was his natural state of mind, one entirely unaffected by his recent history, which was that aside from the few murders he had been able to accomplish, every plan he had hatched since leaving prison had ended in failure. The constant inner voice was crooning to him now, telling him he was the king of the world, untouchable, a little god. He turned south on Ninth, and headed toward the Penn Station area and Holy Redeemer.

  ***

  "How did it go?" Marlene asked. It was after midnight, Marlene was watching celebrities make chitchat on the TV, and Karp had just walked in, looking worn and disgusted.

  "That is a piece of work, little Karen," he said, sitting down on the couch. "You were right, though. She doesn't want to go to jail. In fact, that was actually the first thing she said to me when I sat down. No 'hello, how are you, glad to meet you,' just 'I am not going to jail.' "

  "It's true, no one has manners these days," she said, as he kicked off his shoes and plopped down with a sigh on the couch next to her. She muted the chatter on the set. "So, is she?"

  "Probably not, since she's the only conspirator who knows the whole story. Fong's guy, whoever he is, acted as a cutout between Cherry and Karen. You know what the chances of us finding an anonymous Chinese gentleman who does not want to be found are. Fong we have nothing on without Karen, and nothing on Karen without either Fong or Palmisano. Conceivably we could have assembled a circumstantial case against the bunch of them using Cherry's testimony, but you messed up the possibility of using the girl as a witness."

  "And if I hadn't muscled her, we wouldn't know any of this."

  "Wrong, Marlene. You could've told me your suspicions, we could've brought the girl in, had a talk with her, with her parent along, as required by law. We could have read her the perjury statute, and the penalties therein, and she would've cracked."

  "You're sure of that."

  "Dear, the day I can't break a lying fifteen-year-old girl is the day I hang it up. And with that, we could've raided Fong, and audited him, and traced the payoff to Cherry, and maybe even found the guy who picked up the material from her. And then we would've had Karen Agnelli in a bind. As it is, we have to give a walk to the chief conspirator to nail the peripheral ones, which is not how it's supposed to work. Why the hell did you do it?"

  She stared at the pretty people on the screen. They seemed to be having a good time, even without sound. What was the answer to her husband's perfectly legitimate question? She didn't know. It had something to do with velocity. She'd taken on Paul Agnelli's problem and she didn't want it anymore. She wanted to go away again.

  "The bomb," she said. "Raney. Nora. The kids."

  "I don't understand: what has all that to do with Agnelli?"

  "Ah, don't grill me, okay? I know it doesn't make sense. I've stopped making sense, okay?" She picked up the remote and made laughter fill the room.

  Karp snatched the remote from her and clicked the set off. "This is important," he said. "What's going on? Talk to me, Marlene!"

  She turned to face him, so that her remaining eye could fix his. "You want to know what's going on? It's just blood lust, darling. I want to get the people who killed Nora Raney, just like I wanted to get the people who shot G
iancarlo. And I couldn't so I took it out on a dumb-ass dope dealer and a silly teenage girl. I know it's crazy and irrational, I know that it's the law's business to find those people and put them away. And, lest you get all bent out of shape, I have no project under way to find them. Or Felix. But the feeling is in me. I want to see their blood. Should I go see someone about this? Yes. Will I? Probably not. I don't believe in psychotherapy. It's a faith, like Catholicism. You have to believe, on the basis of exactly zero evidence, that your maladjustments are due to the fact that Dad diddled you at age ten or Mom didn't love you. Or that your brain soup has the wrong kinds of molecules in it. And I don't."

  "So, what do you believe?"

  "I don't know. In fate. In doom. That I can't be with the people I love because my presence puts them in danger. That I'm an instrument of justice manipulated by powers outside this plane of existence, divine or demonic, I can't really tell. I need to get back to the island."

  "Do you understand how crazy what you just said is?"

  "Yes, I do, actually. Which means I'm probably still technically sane, at least in the eyes of the law. Speaking of which, now that you're going to be DA, my exploits are going to come under a good deal more scrutiny. I've just more or less admitted to you that I've committed serious felonies. Let me enumerate: possession of a silencing device, one count; criminal possession of a weapon, two counts; prohibited use of weapon, two counts; menacing, two counts; unlawful imprisonment, second, two counts. I think that's it. It's enough."

  "What're you doing, Marlene?"

  "I'm confessing to an officer of the law. Maybe jail is the best place for me."

  Karp stood up. "No, you're just messing with my head," he said coldly. He felt cold, in fact, the cold of outer space. His wife was receding from him at speed, like an astronaut cut from her tether. "You can't confess to your spouse, as you very well know, but feel free to contact the police. I'm going to bed. You'll let me know your plans."

  ***

  In the morning she was gone, with her dog and many of her cold weather garments. On the kitchen table was a workmanlike note describing in sufficient detail all the hoops that had to be gone through to get the boys registered in school, and a list of household reminders and contacts- doctors, plumbers, repairpersons, and all the various entities necessary to support a middle-class family in Manhattan. Marlene was severing.

  His daughter asked him what was wrong when she came into the kitchen, so he supposed it showed on his face. "Your mom's off again. She left a note."

  Lucy read it. "This is not good. It reads like she's not coming back."

  "My thought, too."

  "Well, don't worry, I can handle this stuff. Do you want me to make coffee?"

  "No, sit down."

  He sat, too, at the kitchen table, with Marlene's note fuming between them like a contract with the devil. "Listen, you are not, repeat not, going to leap into your mother's role around this house. You're still a kid, you're in college, you need to have a college kid's life. In fact, I think it would be a good idea if you finished up at Boston."

  "I can't do that," she said instantly. "How will you manage? What about the boys?"

  "I'll manage fine. If I need help, I'll hire it. In fact, I might even rent this place out and get an apartment in a doorman building. With a full-time housekeeper. I'm going to be a big shot with a car and driver and a bodyguard. And the boys are almost twelve. They can mostly look after themselves."

  Lucy was about to object that the boys could not look after themselves, and would get into any number of scrapes if they were once outside the eagle eye of their sister, but then thought better of it. Being the district attorney was a completely different thing from being a mere minion thereof, even the chief minion. Her father would have police at his beck in any reasonable numbers. The Karp family had outgrown amateur security. Something in her sighed relief, and also whispered more enticingly of escape from the swamp her family had become and into if not precisely the arms of her boyfriend, at least into his daily presence.

  "Okay," she said. "I guess you're right."

  "You're sure? You're not going to go up there writhing in Catholic guilt?"

  "No, I'm fine," she said, and gave him one of those illuminating smiles. "Sad but happy."

  ***

  After the public announcement of John Keegan's nomination to the federal bench and the somewhat later and lower-key announcement that Karp had been nominated to fill his term, the usual King Lear power magic occurred on the eighth floor of the courthouse. Keegan immediately became a nullity as far as the DA's office was concerned, and all his power and influence flowed to Karp, even though Keegan was still formally the district attorney. Because Keegan was not actually retiring from public life (indeed, might even be said to be rising in it), there was no dimunition of phone calls or visits to his office. But as far as the DA's operations were concerned, Karp was in practical terms the DA. Those satraps- bureau chiefs and others- who had crony or political associations with Keegan, or who had rivalrous relations with Butch Karp, now either had to start looking for other work or, if they wanted to stay, had to come and render obeisance to the new magnifico.

  To Karp's wonder, this latter group seemed perfectly natural in their expressions of congratulations and support, even though several of them, to his certain knowledge, hated his guts and had bad-mouthed him and worked to undermine him for years. During these sessions he experienced feelings he could not recall having previously, swollen bullfrog feelings, satisfaction of boot-on-neck feelings.

  "What's the matter, boss? You look queasy," Murrow observed after one of these sessions.

  "I am queasy. I can't get used to being brownnosed shamelessly. I want to say, 'Oh, fuck you, you slob, kissing my ass will not preserve your miserable job for a single day,' but I don't. Somehow it's not allowed. Strange."

  "Yes. And we recall Lord Acton's famous apothegm, don't we?"

  "Yeah. Are we corrupt yet?"

  "I certainly am, since I'm browned by a lot more people than you are, being more accessible. I kind of like it, because I know that the hatred focused on the guy who guards the access to the great man and speaks with his voice is a thousand times greater than the hatred focused on the great man himself. And I'm really such a nice guy. So let them writhe in the dust."

  "I'll pretend you didn't say that, Murrow," replied Karp, thinking now about power and how very much of it he had: that there are few public officials in American life whose power is more absolute within a defined sphere than that of a district attorney.

  "Speaking of writhing," said Murrow, "Ms. Rachman is out there. You want her to come in, or should we make her sweat some of her makeup off."

  "No cruelty, Murrow," said Karp. "Send her in. And stay yourself."

  Laura Rachman came in in a suit so bright blue that it looked like it had been snipped from a French flag. She was wearing a white blouse and a red, white, and blue scarf, giving her the look of a Fourth of July float. She sat and they made pleasantries for a few minutes, during which it was perfectly apparent that Ms. Rachman was just as prepared to kiss ass as any other subordinate manager in the office. Karp, however, stifled a particularly fulsome trope by saying, "We need to talk about what we're going to do about Terry Palmisano."

  "I've suspended her and she's going to resign."

  "You read the investigative report I had the DA squad prepare?"

  "Yes. It's incredibly shocking. I had no idea she was involved with a witness."

  "Uh-huh, well, the problem is that it was a lot more than being involved with a witness."

  "Honestly, I didn't even know Terry was gay," said Rachman, and added, with a rueful laugh, "not that there's anything wrong with that." Karp had observed that there was a class of people who did not register negative information and instead filled the air with non sequitur comments, as here. He said, "I assume you read the Q and A we did on Karen Agnelli."

  "Yes, and obviously we've dropped the case. I personally c
alled the husband to apologize. He doesn't sound like he's going to sue, thank God."

  "Now, focus on this, Laura," said Karp in a more demanding tone. "It has nothing to do with lesbian passion and nothing to do with the husband or lawsuits. It has to do with only one thing: an attorney in this office has knowingly submitted false evidence in a criminal case and wittingly accepted perjured testimony. It's not a question of her resigning; I want her disbarred and I want her in prison. And I want you personally to prepare the case against her."

  "Me? Wouldn't that be a felony bureau case?"

  "I don't care about the bureaucratic partitions. It's your mess and you have to clean it up. Next, I've scheduled a press conference for seven-thirty tomorrow morning. In it I will break the story of how an innocent man was framed with the connivance of the district attorney's office. I will introduce you and you will stand up there and endure public humiliation as you explain every detail of this miserable farce. I expect the headlines will read 'Gay Love Nest Corrupts Rape Bureau at DA.' "

  Rachman opened her mouth to say something, but Karp shook his head and drove on.

  "Next, you will dismiss the case against Dr. Kevin Hirsch, which I'm sure you realize is a pile of horseshit, even without the now suspect involvement of Terry Palmisano."

  "Oh, I see we're letting off all the white boys today."

  "Only those who haven't done anything. You know, one of the things that breaks the liberal heart is that people who've been oppressed for however many centuries, when they escape from oppression it never occurs to them to say, 'Hey, being oppressed is bad, so let's not do any oppression.' No, they pile on to whoever's available with both boots. Isn't that sad and wonderful? But we're not going to do oppression around here. No one's going to use this office to get even. Now, you have patently wasted prosecutorial time on two cases that I know about, in a city that is crawling with bona fide male sexual predators. That's a crime, Laura, a shandah. I expect you to come down on those genuine bad guys like a ton of bricks, regardless of race or social status. I want them put in jail forever, if possible. But we are not going to give a free pass to every black female that accuses a white man. We are going to- for crying out loud- look at the fucking evidence! Do you understand the distinction I just made?"