No Lesser Plea

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “The girls’ pimp is a law-abiding citizen—his property’s been ripped off. So where does he go? The fucking Two-Three, right, and he tells them that this maniacal hooker-killer is on the loose. OK, now this particular pimp is like the sorriest pimp in New York …”

  “Present company excepted, of course,” V.T. put in.

  “Of course, V.T. And, of course, the cops take one look at this guy, who they know very well, and tell him to get fucked. So he leaves the precinct and a block away he gets jumped by the other pimp and three of his torpedoes and they beat the shit out of him and leave him in a trash can.”

  “Is this for real, Guma?” asked Marlene.

  “Honest. I got it from the cops just before I left for dinner. Anyway, the detective who took the original statement from the pimp—he’s a friend of mine, the detective, not the pimp—gets off work a few minutes later and finds the pimp. ‘Ah tol’ you muthafuckas sompin’ goin’ down. Ah tol’ you!’ says the pimp.”

  “What the hell does this have to do with the Complaint Room?”

  “Wait, Butch, this is the best part. The detective figures there might be something in the pimp’s story after all—not the Jack-the-Ripper bullshit, but some kind of fucked-up pimp war. Maybe the wise guys are involved, who knows? So he puts a call out for the SWAT team. The pimp leads them to where the girls are, they blow down the door and make another heroic rescue. So now we have a gaggle of hookers on our hands—they’ll all be down at the Complaint Room tonight to press charges.”

  “Jesus, Guma, big fucking deal. You think I’m going to accept tips? Just sign the form right here, madam. Oh, you’d like to give me a blow-job? How generous, thank you so much.”

  “Karp, you’re a great lawyer, but you have no sexual imagination. I got to take you under my wing.”

  V.T. said, “A truly fascinating story, Guma. However, I don’t believe ‘a gaggle of hookers’ is the correct term of venery.”

  “What is it, then, wise-ass?”

  “How about, an anthology of pros?”

  “No, a tray of tarts,” said Marlene.

  “I’m gone,” said Karp, dropping his napkin on the table and pushing back his chair.

  “No, wait, Butch, you haven’t received your present yet,” said Newbury.

  “What present?”

  “A decoration for your new palatial office.” He handed Karp a flat package wrapped in brown paper. “We’ve all signed it.”

  Karp unwrapped the package. It was a framed photograph, grainy, as if it had been copied from a newspaper. It showed a group of horsemen in odd, square hats galloping into the plane of the picture. They wore white gloves and carried pennanted spears. Under a smoke-filled sky, they were heading toward several squat black shapes that close inspection revealed to be tanks. It was the famous photograph of the last charge of the Polish Lancers, September 1939. Beneath the picture, V.T. had written, “C’est magnifique, mais c’est ne pas la loi.”

  “Thanks, guys,” said Karp. He shook hands all around, got a quick kiss from Ciampi, and walked out into the dark streets toward Foley Square and the Complaint Room.

  The Complaint Room was the gateway to the criminal justice system, just as those little grates set into the curbs are the gateways to the sewage system. It had a similar ambience.

  About fifty by one-hundred feet in size, it was painted with peeling green and ochre paint, lit by dull and flickering fluorescent lights, and overheated. The floor was covered with the evening’s trash and the air smelled of the losing battle Lysol was fighting with urine, vomit, sweaty bodies, and smoke. It looked like the second-class bus station in a third-world country. Half its area was partitioned into eight small booths, in each of which sat a typist with the appropriate equipment, a filing cabinet full of forms, and two chairs, one for the cop and one for the civilian witness if there was one. The cops took turns going into the booth and giving the typist the facts: the time, nature, and location of the alleged crime.

  The ADAs—three by day and two at night—traveled from booth to booth, questioning the arresting officer, dictating the complaint to the typist, then moving on to the next booth. It was a slow process, which meant that the police officers had to sit waiting their turn, sometimes for hours. Once inside the booth, the cop had to wait for the ADA to come around and dictate, and for the typist to type and proofread. Then he signed the affidavit and took the complaint to the docket desk in the corner of the Complaint Room, had the complaint stamped with the docket number, and then went to court for the defendant’s arraignment. A single arrest might thus take up five or six hours of police time, which is one reason why you can never find a cop when you need one.

  Karp walked into the Complaint Room at seven o’clock, to find more-than-usual chaos in progress. There were at least fifty people crowded into the waiting area and spilling out into the hall. Voices were raised in irritation and in the hallway some cops were breaking up a fight between two drunk witnesses. He turned to a woman seated at a desk in the front of the Complaint Room.

  “Debra, what the hell is going on here? And what are you doing here? It’s past seven.”

  Debra Tiel was a tough lady from South Philly who started in the DA’s Office as a typist. Now she ran the Complaint Room. Sharp and commanding, she knew how to get people to do things efficiently and like it; she was one of the indispensable, if unsung, trench soldiers of the bureaucratic state. After almost eleven hours in the pits, settling arguments between typists and cops and typists and ADAs and ADAs and cops and cops and cops, her coffee-colored face was visibly drawn, but her white blouse still retained its perpetual crispness. At the sight of Karp, she hoisted her silver-colored reading glasses from her nose and jammed them into her Afro like the visor of a knight.

  “Sugar, am I glad to see you! We’re short a typist and an ADA and I’ve got sixty people to get into booths. Most of ’em are holdovers from the afternoon, before we closed up for dinner. I mean … !”

  “Who’s working?”

  “Hunk’s in Booth Six, doing good. Ehrengard never showed.”

  “It figures, that shithead! OK, we’ll clean the place out.”

  He walked into the room and scanned the seats. A tall black woman wearing fuchsia hotpants, a red satin camisole and a blond wig was using the pay phone. An elderly woman, her head bandaged, and her face bruised was sitting in a chair looking dazed. Next to her a young cop read the sports page of the Daily News. Two other cops were bringing a wino out of the men’s room and setting him down with some gentleness on a chair. The person next to him, a middle-aged shopkeeper in a checked sportscoat, said “Sheeesh!” and immediately vacated his chair. Karp caught a whiff and sympathized. The wino must have witnessed some significant crime. The cops would dry him out, keep him dry through his testimony and then toss him back into the gutter, where the person whom he had testified against would probably cut his throat some night. Right now, though, he was the safest wino in New York. The rest of the crowd reflected the city’s population—all races, the two major sexes, several of the minor ones, and most social classes were represented, united for once in boredom and imitation.

  Karp took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt-sleeves and climbed up on Debra Tiel’s desk. Pitching his voice to carry, he said, “Alright, may I have your attention please! Everyone, may I have your attention! Hey, you want to shut off the radio?” Martha and the Vandellas vanished and the crowd turned to face the source of the voice booming down from eleven feet up.

  “OK, we’re going to speed things up here a little.” (A few claps and sarcastic cheers from the cops.) “Everybody with homicide, rape, or sex cases raise your hands.”

  “Does that include Dickie Wavers?”

  “Tonight it does—flashing to fondling. All of you, go to Booth Three and get in line. All prostitution charges and all violations, including public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and harassment go to Booth Four and line up. All robberies and assaults, go to Booth One on my right; all burglary,
trespass, go to Booth Two; all larceny, theft, auto theft, go to Booth Five, also anyone with bad-check arrests; all narcotics or gambling charges …”

  “Does that include bookie collars?” a detective called out.

  “Sure does. Go to Booth Six. Now, anyone left?”

  “Just me, man.” Karp looked down from his tower and saw a black detective in a cream-linen jacket.

  “Could I talk to you? I gotta get out of here, like now.”

  Karp had worked with Sonny Dunbar before and liked him. He stepped down from the wastebasket and walked over to the detective. “What’s the problem, you got tickets to the Yankees tonight?”

  Dunbar grimaced and ran his hand across his face. “I only wish, man. No, I got this shitty little purse-snatch collar, I’ve been waiting three hours, and I got serious family troubles, no lie.” He looked at Karp expectantly.

  “Sure, Sonny, no problem. Let’s go into Eight.”

  They went into the booth and Dunbar shot the basic facts to the typist: his name, defendant’s name, victim’s name, witness’s name, time, and location of the crime. Then he described the events in front of the drug store. Karp chuckled. “You wish they were all that easy, right?”

  “Yeah, sure. I thought I was through with that garbage when I transferred to homicide. Anyway, I vouchered the purse, the chick says she’ll testify. The perp has a long sheet already; he’ll probably cop to petty with no trouble. Have you got that?”

  Karp had been jotting notes on a yellow legal pad. He looked up and said, “Sure, Sonny, take off.” Dunbar flashed a smile.

  “Thanks, Butch. I owe you one.”

  Dunbar ran out and Karp dictated the language of the formal complaint to the typist. As he did so, he walked out of the booth to check on his handiwork. The Disneyland Principle had worked again. People were always happier on short lines, even if the waiting time was nearly the same as it would have been on longer ones. Much of the chaos and irritation had drained from the atmosphere in the Complaint Room; it now resembled a first-class bus station. Within an hour, there were scarcely a dozen people left on line.

  Karp moved among the booths, listening to cops and victims, organizing the histories of human suffering and viciousness into the colorless language of the law. As always, he was torn between the natural impulse to sympathize and the requirement to keep the gears rolling. The gears had to win, of course, and not for the first time he reflected on the damage that continuous exposure to these experiences worked on the spirits of the people who made up the criminal justice system. This old lady now, telling him about being beaten bloody and robbed in the elevator of her building. It was the worst thing that ever happened to her. There was no way he could ever make her whole again. Certainly, putting the miserable kid junkie who had done it behind bars for—what, six months?—would hardly put her world back into balance. But he had heard it a hundred times. The cop had seen it fifty times. He looked at the face of the cop who had made the arrest. Young, curly-haired, wispy mustache, with a cynical old-man’s eyes. Armor, like Karp’s armor. He shook himself. He was letting the old lady ramble.

  “Just a minute, Missus McGregor, let’s go over what the man actually said to you. Can you recall his words?”

  As Karp dictated the tale of the mugging he heard a commotion at the front of the Complaint Room, loud female voices, and above them Ray Guma’s unmistakable barrelhouse laugh. Karp finished his dictation, left the booth, and went into the waiting area. Guma was standing in the center of a group of attractive young women waving his cigar and snapping off Groucho Marx one-liners. The women and the cops who were with them were cracking up. “Alright, ladies, I’d like you to remove your outer garments and go into the various booths we got here according to speciality. Booth One, fellatio. Booth Two, lesbian orgies. Booth Three, rim jobs. Booth Four, eyyahh-hah-hah, UNSPEAKABLE PRACTICES! Booth Five …” He caught sight of Karp. “Hey, Butch, the party’s on! What’d I tell you, hey?”

  “Goom, what the fuck is going on here?”

  “It’s the girls from the Two-Three Precinct. The kidnap victims I told you about at dinner. They’re here to make their complaint. I’m directing traffic.” He rolled his eyes, waggled his cigar in his mouth, and grabbed handfuls of buttock from the two women on either side of him. They squealed girlishly, like chorus girls in a Marx Brothers’ movie, being trained to pick up quickly on sexual fantasies.

  “Goddam, Guma, this isn’t a whorehouse.”

  Guma put a puzzled expression on his face. “It’s not? Gosh, I’m sorry, I thought this was One hundred Centre Street.”

  “Hey, what’s going on?” said a new voice. “Guma! My man! You finally brought your sisters around to meet me.” Roland Hrcany was the other ADA working the Complaint Room. He looked less like a New York lawyer than a refugee from Muscle Beach; he was in fact a serious weight lifter, with a weight lifter’s big shoulders, broad chest, and wasp waist. He had white-blond hair, no stranger to Clairol, swept back to fall below his collar, baby-blue eyes, and a ferocious cavalry mustache under a large nose.

  Guma clapped Hrcany on his massive shoulder. “Girls, this is it! Allow me to introduce Hunk Hrcany, the Hungarian Hustler and Heartbreaker. He will be servicing your every need in Booth Six tonight, for those who desire the crude and violent approach. And …” with a leer, “he has agreed to waive his usual fee. How about that?” Giggles. A few claps.

  Karp broke in, “Guma, as long as you’re here, you might as well work. Take your little friends to Booth Eight and get their statements, OK? I’d like to get out of here before dawn.”

  “Oh, no, Butch, do I hafta? OK, ladies, follow me.”

  Guma led the call girls away. Hrcany looked after them with a laugh. “Fuckin’ guy! I’m a sex maniac. He’s off the charts. Hey, Butch, I heard about homicide. Good for you, baby.”

  “Yeah, thanks, if I live through tonight.”

  As they turned back to work, the bomb exploded.

  Out of the large number of people opposed to American involvement in the Vietnam War a small proportion had become convinced that the only way to stop it was to bring down the entire structure of the state—literally—with explosives. A good place to start was the criminal justice system, and so that day a former cheerleader from Larchmont had dropped off a package containing a dynamite bomb in the fifth floor women’s toilet at 100 Centre Street. The bomb was not powerful enough to bring down the American state, but it sufficed to bring down the ceiling of the Complaint Room, a good beginning.

  Karp was still on his feet, but bent over with his arms over his head. Plaster chunks and bits of masonry rained down on the room and the air was opaque with steam and gray dust. The lights had gone, except for the battery-operated emergency lanterns over the exit. Screams of dismay were coming from the direction of Booth Eight. A figure stumbled toward Karp through the murk. Blinking the dust out of his eyes, Karp saw that it was Debra Tiel.

  “Butch! You OK? What the hell happened?”

  “Damned if I know, but I think it was a bomb. Look, Debra, stand over by the exit and start yelling for people to come to you. I’ll check the booths and make sure nobody’s hurt. Good thing this didn’t happen two hours ago.” She moved off and began to call people to the exit. Karp picked his way through the wreckage, passing stumbling people made anonymous by the pall of dust that covered their faces and clothes. He bumped into Guma leaning against a wall, trying to get the dust out of his eyes.

  “Goom, you OK?”

  “Butch, what the fuck! I can’t see for shit.” Karp gave him his still-damp handkerchief, and Guma cleaned his eyes.

  “Goddam, justice is blind, but this is too much!” He called out to his prostitutes, “Let’s move it, girls. Next stop my place and a nice shower.” They followed him in a bunch, looking now like so many pillars of salt.

  There seemed to be no panic and few serious injuries. Karp saw two cops carrying the mugged Missus McGregor, who was out cold and bleeding from another head wound. Not
her day, thought Karp. In the last booth, he found a typist, still sitting at her table, staring at a chunk of masonry and tile that had crushed her machine and missed her head by inches.

  “Miss Park, time to go. Miss Park … ?”

  She was frozen, like a rabbit mesmerized by a snake. There was a rumbling sound and more bits of plaster fell down. Karp could hear sirens in the distance. He kicked the typing table away, swept the typist up in his arms, and walked out of the Complaint Room, down the corridor and down the stairs.

  The stairway was full of smoke and the smell of drains. Two men, from the Bomb Squad judging by their flak jackets, raced past him. Then came three masked firemen carrying hoses. Karp yelled, “Fifth floor, I think,” to their backs and then continued down the four flights to the street.

  The square was full of fire engines, police cars, and ambulances, and lit with flashing red and blue lights. He deposited his burden with one of the ambulance crews and then began to walk home. A perfect end to a perfect day, he thought. He’d lost his suit jacket and the evening was getting chilly. He began to jog up Broadway. At Canal Street, he stopped at Dave’s, an all-night sidewalk-service joint for a knish and an egg cream. The counterman gave him an odd look. “What happened to you, man?”

  “I was bombed,” said Karp. He felt giddy with the release of tension. He related the story of the bombing to the counterman, who was unimpressed.

  “That’s New York,” he said.

  Later, back in his apartment, after a long hot bath, he called his wife at her parents’ home in Los Angeles. He told her about his transfer to the Homicide Bureau.

  “That’s very nice, Butch.”

  “It’s more than that, Susan. I don’t think anybody has ever made homicide with as little time in the office as I’ve had.”