No Lesser Plea

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Just kidding, Marlene. The truth is, you are the first human being besides me to enter this apartment since I moved in. You have stolen the virginity of my Macy’s seventy-nine dollar box spring and mattress. OK?”

  “Yeah? Well, keep it that way, Buster, if you know what’s good for you.” She poked him sharply in the midsection, and trotted out of the apartment. He followed, happy and enslaved.

  They ate huge steaks at Max’s, oblivious to the glitter underground cavorting around them. They saw a movie. They talked. Karp spilled his guts; he had not talked so much outside a courtroom in years, if ever. For a loudmouth, Marlene was a surprisingly good listener. They walked. They shared an egg cream from a sidewalk stand on Canal Street near Broadway, the heart of New York’s bazaar, the junction of Little Italy, Chinatown, and SoHo. There was nothing in the world, legal or illegal, you could not buy within half a mile of where they stood: dried sea cucumbers from the Sulu Sea, a World War II bombsight, a Parmesan cheese as tall as a man, an abstract expressionist painting, a gram of cocaine, a ton of powdered cinnamon, a ton of cocaine, the services of a naughty masseuse, an acupuncturist, a fortune teller, an assassin.

  Karp was not in the market for any of those exotica. He thought, I have what I need. Then he thought, be careful, this is a classic rebound situation. He looked at Marlene leaning against the metal serving counter, a Marlboro clenched in her teeth at a jaunty angle, observing the midnight ramblers on Canal Street. He thought about rebounding, about rebounding in basketball. An image popped into his head, of himself jumping high into the air and catching Marlene, naked and curled into a ball, rebounding off a backboard, snatching her away from half a dozen grabbing hands. He laughed out loud. But when Marlene asked him what he was laughing about, he said, “Nothing. You had to be there.”

  They strolled back uptown to Karp’s place. The air remained warm and not as humid as it would be later in the summer. Marlene went into an all-night emporium and bought, over his protests, a metal wastebasket with the Statue of Liberty and other New York scenes printed on it.

  Toward dawn, they were in bed, pumping each other to yet another Big O. Remarkable how Marlene, filthy mouthed in the office, in deepest sex would say only “oh gosh” and “oh dear” like a barely fallen Carmelite. Now, though, she was even passed the “oh gosh” stage, sweating and flushed, her head lashing back and forth across the pillow like the tail of a harpooned eel, at which point the telephone rang. Around the sixth ring, the sound penetrated into Karp’s brain. He let ten more rings go by, until he realized both that the phone was not going to stop and that he was conditioned, like Pavlov’s dog, to stop what he was doing, no matter what, and answer a ringing phone.

  “Sorry, I got to answer that,” he gasped.

  “Sure, yeah. But make it snappy,” said Marlene.

  He rolled off and picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”

  “Karp, is that you?”

  “No, it’s Henry Kissinger. Who is this?”

  “Butch, it’s me, Sonny Dunbar. I been trying to get you all night.”

  “Well, you got me now. This better be good, Sonny.”

  “No, it’s bad, real bad. Donny’s dead.”

  “Dead? When … what happened?”

  “They called us from Vorland about ten-thirty. He was dead in his cell at bed check. They think he got hold of some dope and OD’d. I’m over at his house—we just got my sister to bed. I still can’t believe it, you know? Anyway, I thought you better hear about it.”

  “Thanks, Sonny. Look, I’m sorry as hell about this … let’s talk later, see where we stand.”

  Karp hung up and flopped back on the pillow. He hadn’t thought about Mandeville Louis and Donald Walker for some time. He was carrying a full caseload now; it was hard enough to keep abreast of current cases, not to mention the strain of the Garrahy campaign. Tomorrow he would have to pull the file and rethink the case. But these thoughts were interrupted by a small, warm hand gliding down his belly to his groin.

  “Ding-dong! Remember me?”

  “Oh, yeah. Where was I?”

  “Right here. Just a little higher. Ahh, that’s marvelous,” she said. But he couldn’t get Donald Walker’s frightened face out of his mind. That man was scared shitless, he thought, and he was right.

  At the office the next day, Karp felt sleepy and sated, and found himself staring out the window at nothing. Shortly after noon, Sonny Dunbar came into his office, looking ashen and drawn.

  “Pretty rough, huh?” said Karp. “You feel like going for coffee or a drink?”

  “Nah, I got coffee up the wazzoo.”

  “OK, what’s the story?”

  Dunbar told a fairly common tale, but a sad one nonetheless. Donald Walker had drawn three-to-five for his role in the Marchione killings. Because he had no record of violence—and because Karp put in a good word—he was sent to the minimum-security facility at Vorland, in the Hudson Valley, about ninety minutes out of the city.

  At Vorland, he was supposed to receive therapy and rehabilitation in the company of other young men who had gotten into trouble but were not regarded as dangerous, and whose crimes did not seem to warrant a ticket to the hell of Attica.

  Or so it was supposed to work. Because of the peculiar distinction the law makes between adult and juvenile offenders, many individuals in Vorland’s population had half a dozen years of ferocious criminality behind them when their slates were wiped clean on their eighteenth birthdays. They may have been adult first offenders, but they were hardly simple lads in their first bit of trouble.

  Besides that, Vorland had been designed for a high ratio of correction officers to inmates. That ratio was consumed—like so many other good ideas—by the implacable grinding of the criminal justice machine. Vorland had twice as many inmates as it had been designed for. It was better than the Tombs; it was better than Attica, but that wasn’t saying much. It was also one of the easiest places in the state of New York to cop drugs. The prison dealers just got on the phone and arranged for a friend to take a pleasant drive upstate, take a stroll along the eight-foot chain-link fence that bounded the facility, and flip a package over the top at a prearranged time and place.

  Apparently Donald Walker had gotten a phone call the previous evening. It was from a woman claiming to be his sister; this was later discovered to be a lie. Walker had talked with her for a few minutes and the next day had been seen walking near the fence in the area known to the inmates as the Holy Land, because of the good things that fell out of the sky. By nine that evening he was dead, his belt around his arm, an empty syringe sticking in his vein.

  “The little jerk,” Dunbar went on, “he was clean for most of a year and then he goes and pulls a dumb trick the first time somebody, some ‘friend’ lays some shit on him. Go figure!”

  “You know what they say, ‘when the needle goes in, it never comes out.’ Any lead on the supplier?”

  “Who the fuck knows? Could be anybody—a friend of a friend …”

  “I’m thinking who might want him dead.”

  “Who, that what’s-his-face, Louis? He’s still in the funny farm, right?”

  “Right. But he could have set it up.”

  “Come on, Karp. You been reading too many books. The mob maybe does stuff like that. We’re talking a mutt, a shooter, with no organization, no record. Besides, he’s still nailed—you still got the old lady and the gun, the other evidence too.”

  “Yeah, but Donny was the linchpin. And, you know something? I’m not so sure that Mr. Louis is such a mutt. This bastard, I don’t know, he stinks, from the word go. There’s wheels within wheels going on there. Look, Sonny, I think it’s important that we try to find the third man.”

  “What third man? The other guy in the car? Give me a break, Karp. It’s been near two goddamn years. How’m I going to start looking? Walk down Lenox Avenue, bracing dudes: ‘Say, scuse me bro’, you happen to be in a car somewheres back in Nineteen-seventy with a guy who wasted a coupla honkie
s in a liquor store? No? Well, have a nice day.’ Fuck me, Jack! You know how many cases I’m holding?”

  “OK, Sonny, don’t get your balls in an uproar. Just a suggestion. We got the gun, we’ll go with that. On the other hand, you stumble on something, give me a call, OK? I want this shithead bad.”

  “I can tell that. It’ll have to be stumble though, I’m warning you. Meanwhile, I got to go to a funeral.”

  After Dunbar left, Karp leafed through his beautiful file on the Marchione case. He had his doubts. An old lady witness on a dark street. A gun. Some bits of glass. Juries liked eyewitnesses, despite their notorious unreliability. Sussman would tear this shit apart— without Donald Walker to weave it together.

  Karp got up and stretched. He decided to go down to the evidence locker to check over some material from a case he was preparing for presentation to the bureau on Friday. Karp liked to physically handle the evidence. He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but the sight and feel of the guns, knives, chemicals, and blunt instruments with which New Yorkers ended one another’s lives enriched his presentation of a case. For the same reason, he forced himself to visit the morgue and look at the victims. Also, there was always the chance, however slight, that something would pop out at him from the dreadful stuff and change the meaning of a case.

  In the evidence locker Proud Mary was looking glum.

  “What’s happening, Mary?”

  “I swear, Karp, that Guma ever come by me again I better not have no gun, or no knife in my hand. It took me the whole damn day to straighten out the mess you all made. Gettin’ stuff back in the right boxes, fixin’ tags … damn, I musta been pure crazy givin’ him my key.”

  “That, or drunk. I hear it was quite a party, not that I remember much of it.”

  She let out a loud chuckle. “Shee-it! It was a party though. Dance? I was hurtin’ all the next day. But you don’ wanna hear ’bout no old lady miseries—what can we do for you today?”

  Karp consulted a slip of paper. “I need Veliz,” he said, and read off a case number. Then, as an afterthought, he said, “Oh, and give me Louis, too.” On that one he had the number memorized. In a few minutes, Mary had returned with two covered cardboard boxes.

  Karp signed them out and hefted the boxes. Immediately, he knew something was wrong. The boxes were too light a load. Veliz was a razor job. But there should have been a heavy .38 in the Louis box. He tore off the lid, his heart pounding. Plastic bags, a liquor bottle, no gun.

  “Mary, where’s the gun?”

  “What gun is that, Mr. Karp?”

  “The gun that’s supposed to be in this box. Look, read the box inventory. There’s supposed to be a Colt .38 Airweight here. Where is it?”

  Mary’s mouth hung slack for a moment and her eyes were wide with fear. “Oh, Jesus God, Mr. Karp, I don’t know! I found all these guns here in a trash can, and I put them … I put them back in the plastic bags in the right boxes, but that’s all there was. What’m I gonna do?”

  “I don’t know, Mary, but we got to find that gun. Look, you’re going to have to search every box in this locker. I’ll check with some of the people at the party.”

  Tears shone on Mary’s cheeks. “Mr. Karp, I got twenty-five years in. I got retirement in three years. They could fire me for this …”

  He patted her shoulder. “Nobody’s firing anybody, and nobody has to know about this. Don’t worry, we’ll find it. Just start looking, hey?”

  He nailed Guma outside of the fourth floor courtrooms.

  “Hey, Butch, some party!” said Guma, leering like a gargoyle.

  “Yeah, right. Especially the part with the evidence guns. Guma, I mean, do you ever fucking think about what you’re doing? You got any idea of how much shit you put me in with that dumb trick?”

  Guma’s smile faded. “What’s wrong with you, man? Relax!”

  “Relax, my ass! I just checked the evidence room and the pistol in the Marchione case is gone. You remember the Marchione case?”

  “Yeah, that’s the guy who pulled the wacko act, the one you got a hard-on for.”

  “That’s right, I’m a little quirky that way, I don’t like seeing cold-blooded multiple murderers get a free walk.”

  “What walk? I thought you had an eye on that, and his buddy snitched, right?”

  “Right, but the snitch is dead, and the eye is about a hundred and two. The gun is my case, man, and you fucking lost it.”

  Guma chewed his lower lip and averted his eyes from Karp’s smoldering gaze. “OK, OK, let me think. Look it’s bad, but it’s not that bad. If it’s not still in the Gym, then Luis and his crew probably picked it up.”

  “Who the fuck is Luis?”

  “The head of the night cleaning crew. I slipped him fifty to come back after the party and clean up, and turn the place back into an office. You know, move the partitions and shit. We always do it after a Gym party. I can check with him when he comes on at six-thirty tonight.”

  “Great, Guma. Let’s hope he didn’t loan it to his cousin to knock over a bank.”

  “Hell, no, Butch, Luis is all right. In fact, he was telling me how he wanted to be a cop. He’s a law-and-order dude right down the line. Trust me, it’ll be OK.”

  “It’ll never be OK, Guma—the goddamn chain of custody for the goddamn gun is blown to hell. What am I going to do, depose the goddamn janitor? Your honor, we’re pretty, fairly sure we got the right gun here as People’s Exhibit 1—tell ’em, Luis! Too bad he’s not a cop—what is he, too short?”

  “Nah, he had a little history of breaking and entering, but …”

  “Guma, NO MORE!” Karp put his hands over his ears and backed away. “Just find it, hey? I don’t want to know another fucking thing about who got it or where it’s been.”

  “By tonight, guaranteed!” yelled Guma, as Karp vanished into the Streets of Calcutta.

  But Karp was no longer thinking about the gun. He was thinking about the third man. He had to have the third man in the car, and get him with something so heavy that the guy would turn on Louis. He didn’t know how to find him, or how to turn him if he did find him. All he knew was that Louis wasn’t going to be allowed to slip through the cracks. He thought, at least he’s in Matteawan, at least we know where he is.

  In fact, Mandeville Louis was nowhere near Matteawan at that moment. He was in a holding pen in that very building, waiting for a hearing, trying to slip through the cracks.

  The cracks were pretty big. At about two o’clock that afternoon Louis was called into Part 30 of the Supreme Court. Part 30 was a calendar court, a gritty switching yard of the criminal justice system. No trials were held there. Instead, defendants were brought before a judge, asked for a plea, and, if they pleaded not guilty, the judge set bail and calendared a trial date in another part. All returnees from Matteawan were brought to Part 30.

  Calendar courts handled about a hundred cases a day. Their only purpose was to promote efficient movement in the system. The ADAs assigned to Part 30 were always the youngest, the most inexperienced from the ranks of the Criminal Court or the Felony Trial Bureau. In general, they learned about the case in the few seconds between the time the clerk called it and the time the judge asked what the People wished to do.

  The People today in Part 30 was Dean Pennberry, a bright enough young man, but the ink on his bar exam was still damp. He favored bow ties and sober three-piece suits, which his mom bought for him. He was just getting over acne and still got the shakes when he had to talk to a judge.

  The judge was Mervyn Stein. His devoted service on behalf of the Narcotics Control Commission and several other city agencies had earned him a lifetime job on the bench. One hundred Centre Street was a small world. The same characters appeared in different roles, defender one day, prosecutor the next, judge the week after, like characters in an interminable Chinese opera.

  Judge Stein did not have a distinguished bench, but it suited him. Stein liked to make deals; he prided himself also on his case flo
w. Part 30 was hardly anything but deals. He had a talent for avoiding the legal niceties—like justice, which might slow things down in his court. As a result, from his first weeks as a judge he had been known as Merv the Swerve.

  “How does the defendant plead,” Judge Stein asked Leonard Sussman. He was surprised to see so distinguished a defense counsel in his courtroom, surprised but pleased. Not only did the lawyer add tone to his generally undistinguished circus, but Stein was glad of the opportunity to do a good turn for someone with powerful political connections.

  “Not guilty, Your Honor,” said Mandeville Louis earnestly. He was dressed in a yellow Tombs jumpsuit again, and to all appearances sane as a brick.

  Stein glanced over the case file before him. “OK, wait a minute,” he said, “this is a two-year-old case. Is that right, Mister Pennberry? The crime was Nineteen-seventy and this is seventy-two?”

  “That’s correct, Your Honor, ah … two years this past March.”

  “Mister Sussman, have you discussed this case with the People?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. My client would be willing to plead guilty to a charge of manslaughter in the first degree, with a sentence of zero to twelve years.”

  This offer sounded fine to Stein. If accepted, it meant that he would get credit for a felony conviction and a twelve-year sentence. Oddly enough, it was also fine with Louis, who had directed Sussman to make it. This was because in New York State there is a thing called a Max-out Rule, which states that a convict may be incarcerated for only two-thirds of the maximum sentence handed out by the judge.

  But the zero was what counted. Louis would be up for parole immediately. In most cases with a zero-to-twelve sentence, the Parole Board would insist on at least a year in prison, but here was a man who had “served” two years in Matteawan. With Sussman’s help, the Parole Board might quickly dispose of Louis’s case. It was, after all, under considerable pressure to relieve the monstrous overcrowding of Attica. He could be out walking in a matter of weeks. The board had its own numbers game.

  Pennberry was uncomfortable, not so much about Louis walking but about how the twelve-year max would look. He swallowed hard and cleared his throat.