No Lesser Plea

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Not the jumping-into-bed part.”

  “Ooh, goody. I’m hot as a pistol. Let’s take a cab.”

  As Guma had predicted, it was a helluva wake. Flags flew at half-mast throughout the city as the mortal remains of Francis Garrahy lay in state for three days in a funeral home, guarded by spit-and-polished cops from the Emerald Society, while the great and famous and the ordinary people whose lives he had touched filed past. Then came the state funeral with its police bands, the eulogy by the governor himself, the tributes by anyone of any consequence connected to the criminal justice business, the City of New York, or Ireland.

  They buried him on a sunny Saturday in June in Queens, the Borough of the Dead and the Might As Well Be, as they say in Manhattan. Karp went, as did the rest of the office, and did not cry. He was amazed to see Ray Guma wiping tears and blowing his nose like a bereaved widow.

  Chapter 15

  On the Monday after Garrahy’s funeral, Sanford L. Bloom held his first senior staff meeting as district attorney. Karp’s name had been entered as an assistant bureau chief, in what was probably one of Garrahy’s last official acts, so he was on the list and he attended.

  The nine bureau chiefs and their deputies took their places around the long oak table in the DA’s conference room. Conlin and Joe Lerner were up toward the head of the table next to the door to the new DA’s office. Conlin looked dyspeptic while Lerner looked nervous and uncomfortable. The other chiefs—all Garrahy’s men, some of whom had served him for decades—appeared similarly uncomfortable, like the leaders of a nation defeated in war, waiting upon the commander of the occupying forces.

  Karp sat next to his new boss, Frank Gelb, whom he barely knew. Gelb was a quiet man, heavy set, balding, with a ginger mustache. As head of Criminal Courts, he had the most frustrating and thankless job in the justice system; after only a few months in the post he looked worn.

  “What’s happening, Frank?” said Karp.

  Gelb regarded him bleakly. “Damned if I know. They told me to show up, so I showed up. There’s no agenda. The rumor is, no reorganization, and he’s sticking with the bureau chiefs he’s got, for the time being. I guess this’ll be a pep talk, the great traditions of the New York DA’s office, et cetera. Shit, Garrahy’s not even cold. What is he going to do, tell the world the old man didn’t know what he was doing? On the other hand …”

  “What, on the other hand?”

  “Apparently, he’s been closeted with Conrad Wharton ever since the funeral. Also, I hear stirrings from my buddies in personnel and budget. There’s forty new attorney positions in the budget for the next fiscal year. I hear Conrad is carving out a little empire from those.”

  “No way! Those are courtroom slots. They’d have to be crazy to use them anyplace else. How’s he going to move cases without attorneys?”

  Gelb sighed and ran his hand across the top of his scalp. “There are ways and ways. In any case we will soon see. Oh, by the way, you might as well move into the Assistant Bureau Chief Office. It’s always a mistake to have empty office space when a change in regime is going on. One of the eternal verities of bureaucratic life.”

  Karp was about to ask what an assistant bureau chief actually did for a living, when the door to the DA’s office swung open and Bloom strode vigorously into the room, with a pink and shiny Wharton trailing behind him, as if he were a painted pull toy.

  Sanford Bloom was a medium-sized man with large moist eyes, a full mouth and a thin, prominent nose. He was forty-four and looked much younger. He was tanned with his brown hair coiffed over his ears in a politician’s blowdry. His face was unmarked by lines of worry, which was not surprising, since he had enjoyed ease and wealth and the right contacts since the cradle. He had a softness of expression about his eyes and mouth, the suggestion being that, if seriously crossed, his lip would begin to tremble and his face might dissolve into petulance.

  Bloom sat at the head of the table. There was no room at the table for Wharton, who waited politely for one of the seated men to make room for him. No one moved. After a minute he pulled up one of the straight-backed chairs lined against one wall and settled himself to Bloom’s right rear, like a translator behind a diplomat.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you all here,” Bloom began with a boyish smile, and got a chuckle in response. “Let me say, first of all,” he continued, “that I had and retain the greatest admiration for the late Phil Garrahy and for this office. But as I look around at the conditions we now find ourselves in, I have to say, and believe me, it is painful for me to say it, that the current methods and procedures of the New York District Attorney’s Office are totally inadequate for the modern age. Gentlemen, we are losing the war on crime in this city!”

  Here he paused for effect and looked around the table. Silence and blank faces. He cleared his throat and resumed.

  “The productivity of this office has not significantly increased in thirty years, while crime has increased tenfold. Our record-keeping systems are a disaster. We have no way of centrally tracking a case through the system, to find out where the worst delays are, and get these cases moving again. This is the twentieth century, men! We’ve got to modernize. I need new ideas. I want this office to become a leader in criminal justice system innovation.”

  He stared around the table again. No one came up with any new ideas. Conlin stared off into space.

  “I don’t intend to make any massive changes in personnel or organization, right off. I believe in giving all of you a chance to see if you can play in a new ball game. On the other hand, I have to start exerting some control over the way this office is run, and I need, that is, the Office needs, an administrative bureau on a par with the operational bureaus. I have chosen Chip Wharton here, who I think you all know, to head up that new organization. I know I can count on all of you to give him your strong support. Well, any comments? Suggestions?”

  Bloom looked around brightly. After a long pause, Joe Lerner said, “Ah … Chief, how are we going to staff this new bureau? Is it going to be a tap on the existing resources?”

  “Not at all, Carl … Joe? Is it Joe? Sorry. Not at all, Joe. The existing units will be held harmless. It so happens that we are expecting an increase in positions in the upcoming fiscal year, which we will use to establish the new bureau.”

  Jaws dropped all around the table and half a dozen bureau chiefs all started talking at once. Everybody had been expecting a share of the new recruits, so that maybe they would be only up to their necks in the shit rather than nostril-deep. Bloom raised his hands for silence and scowled until the grumbling died away.

  “I am not,” he said, “going to keep pouring resources down a rathole. The legal staff you have now is working at about a tenth of the efficiency it could have with a decent system. I need the new slots to set up such a system, and enforce it. I hope that all of you will help me do that. If not …”

  He let the statement hang. No one said a word. There was some discussion of minor administrative details after that, and ten minutes later the chiefs were dispersing to their posts.

  In the hallway outside Karp shook his head in disbelief, then said to Gelb, “You were right. I can’t believe it. More lawyers is throwing resources down a rathole? A rathole? He should know from ratholes, right?”

  Gelb sighed and glanced around to check for big ears. “Right, and Wharton seems to have fixed himself a nice little nest. On the other hand, Bloom is a pretty bright guy, I hear. I mean, he’s right, in a way, things are pretty fucked up.”

  “Come on, anybody who talks to Wharton more than ten minutes has got to be an asshole. And giving Corncob our lawyer slots for admin.? I still can’t believe it. What are we going to do?”

  “What’s the choice? We do our jobs, the best we can. Or get the fuck out, like Jack Conlin.”

  “Conlin’s leaving?”

  “Are you serious? He had a job lined up with Whitman Brady about twenty minutes after the governor announced Bloom. I figur
e a quintupling of his current salary the first year. He’ll cry all the way to the bank.”

  “Yeah, but Jack Conlin defending skells? Yecch!”

  “But very high-class skells. Hey, Jack was always out for number one. If he can’t have the power, he’ll have the coins. Oh, well, if I had Jack’s rep, I’d be off too. Christ, if I had his hair I would. What about you? You figure to stay?”

  “Me? I hadn’t thought about it much. I guess I’ll stick around. It might be interesting.”

  “I can guarantee that, kid,” said Gelb.

  They agreed to meet later in the day to discuss the details of Karp’s new job. Gelb left and Karp rode down to the snack bar for a coffee and a greasy doughnut to go. He entered the elevator to ride up to six and begin cleaning out his Homicide Bureau office. Someone said, “Hold it!” Karp pushed the button like a good citizen and Joe Lerner got in.

  “How did you like your new boy, Karp?” Lerner asked.

  “He’s not my new boy, Joe.”

  “Oh, no? I would think he might be favorably disposed to the guy who iced the competition. I’m sure that will be brought to his attention. I mean Wharton and Mr. Twentieth Century there are going to need a fucking lawyer on the team, and you, whatever else you are, are a lawyer.”

  The elevator doors opened. Lerner moved to get out, but Karp blocked his way. The automatic door went ka-chunk, ka-chunk against his shoulder.

  “Piss on all that, Lerner! I don’t give a damn what you think about me or what I did. I presume you’re acting bureau chief now that Conlin is out. Congratulations. I would like to see the acting bureau chief sometime today to discuss a number of cases I have been working on, since despite the recent tragic events I believe we are still in the business of putting asses in jail, ever more efficiently, of course. Now, how about it Mister Lerner?”

  Lerner glared at him for a couple of beats, then pushed past Karp into the hallway. “Call the girl and set it up,” he snapped.

  “Maybe I should get out of this too,” said Karp.

  “Oh, bullshit!” replied Marlene Ciampi. Karp was sitting in her old wooden swivel chair in her tiny office in the walled-in hallway, and Ciampi was sitting cosily in his lap. It was about seven o’clock that Monday evening. Karp had just finished telling Marlene about his day, and was feeling mildly sorry for himself.

  “Why is it bullshit? Move your ass, you’re squashing my keys into me.”

  “Sorry. It’s bullshit because the last thing you need is another giant upset in your life, on top of your wife and Garrahy. Give it a year with Bloom, or two. How bad could it be?”

  “Real bad. Gelb’s got me doing all the administrative work. I’ll be an old man before I see a courtroom again. Also, I’m in charge of recruiting and training, which I’ve never done before. I mean how the hell do you tell if somebody is going to make a good ADA?”

  “Ask them to tell you a lie. If you fall for it, they’re in. Do you mind if I stroke your fevered brow?”

  “No, go right ahead. OK, then I go to see my friend Joe Lerner, we’re talking about homicide cases I’m handling, and I tell him I want to keep following this business with the Marchione killer. No way, he says—get this—because he thinks I’ll throw the case to feed the numbers. Me! I fucking invented that case.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Ah, we worked it out. A little screaming and yelling, clenched fists, tight jaws, your basic locker-room fight. He’s really a good guy, just being a hard-ass because he’s pissed at me from the Garrahy campaign. But he knows it’s my case, and if he can get it lifted from Homicide’s effective caseload for free, it’s gravy to him. He saw the light.

  “Oh, yeah, and this is the cherry on top—Gelb told me I have to represent the bureau on Wharton’s fucking task force. Can you believe this?”

  “I don’t know, you might do some good. You can’t slay dragons all the time. Sometimes you have to polish your sword, or whatever. Anyway, you’ll survive. Between me and Corncob, this is the year you get your character built.”

  “Thanks, Marlene, I needed that. What was your day like?”

  “Dreamy. I spent the morning with the bomb squad out at Hunts Point. Just little me and all those big, brave, macho police officers. Those guys are real men, not paper-shuffling candy-ass lawyers like you.”

  “Oh yeah? What were you out there for?”

  “My terrorists, remember? The cops set up a demo of different kinds of explosives and devices, fuses, detonators, timers—the works. They were falling all over themselves to show me what kind of daredevils they were. I’m surprised I wasn’t blown to smithereens. Smithereens! I’ve always loved that word. Maybe I was a bomber in a previous life. Look, I got souvenirs!”

  She reached out to her desk and scooped up several objects. Holding up a sphere of tan puttylike material, she said, in a deep-voiced, heavy Queens accent, “This here’s a genuine piece of C-4, size of a golf ball, it’d blow yer ass to Canarsie, it ever went off, heh-heh. Now this here’s yer primacord. Looks like something you’d hang yer undies on, hey? You wrap a piece a this aroun’ a telephone pole, set it off, wham—cut that mother right off at the knees.”

  “Marlene, this is real stuff? They gave it to you?”

  “Shit, no! I ripped it off. It’s my payment for handling five hours of patronizing chauvie bullshit with unrelenting cheerfulness.”

  “What’re you going to use it for?”

  “I don’t know—I’ll think of something. Oh, here’s the best one. It’s a fixed-time detonator.” She held up a finger-long black plastic tube with a knurled end and a metal ring dangling from its side. “What you do is, you take the primacord and stick it in this little hole here, like this. Then you wrap the cord around the C-4, like this. Instant bomb. When you twist the end of the detonator, it breaks a vial of acid, which eats through a wire in a fixed time—this one is for two minutes—which releases a spring, setting off a cap, which explodes the primacord and the plastic. You can’t stop it going off once it’s set. Even works under water. Neat, heh?”

  “Marvelous. Now put it away. It gives me the willies.”

  Her face broke into a fiendish grin. “The willies? I’ll give you willies.” With which she raised herself up, twisted the detonator, pulled Karp’s waistband out, and dropped the bomb down his pants.

  Karp came out of the chair like a rocket, dumping Marlene on the floor, bellowing and trying simultaneously to grab the thing by reaching down his front and to shake the bomb down his pants leg by dancing on one foot. But the irregularly shaped device had hung up somewhere in the crotch area, and Karp had to drop his trousers and pick it up. He was about to heave it over the partition toward what he prayed was a deserted hallway, when his brain started to function again, and he looked around to see what Marlene was doing.

  She was still sitting on the floor, shaking in a paroxysm of silent laughter. “Oh, God,” she gasped, “It’s OK! I didn’t … I didn’t … remove the safety pin with a … Oh, God … look at you … with a sharp downward pull on the ring.”

  Karp was not amused. He put the bomb down on the desk and pulled up his pants. Then he took off his belt.

  “OK, Ciampi, this is it,” he snarled.

  “Ahh, come on, Butch, it was just a joke. This is me, Marlene, your main squeeze. You think I would blow my favorite genitalia to smithereens? Besides, you wouldn’t want to make marks on my lush, milky-white thighs, or my adorable perfectly rounded buttocks, would you?” She spread her raised knees a few inches, waggled her hips, and contorted her face into a parody of cross-eyed lust.

  Karp swung the belt menacingly for a moment. Then he sputtered into laughter, too, and reached his hand down to help her off the floor. She gave him a hot squirmy hug.

  “Forgive?” she asked into his ear.

  “Not only that, but I’m going to do you a good one. After I move my stuff down to Criminal Courts, I’ll help you move yours into my old office.”

  “Oh goodie, a window! Is it
legal?”

  “Who gives a shit? Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

  “Ah, Butchie, when you do lawyer talk like that it makes me all shivery inside. OK, I’ll get packed up here. Then can we go out?”

  “Absolutely. The usual dinner, movie, sex?”

  “Yes, yawn.”

  “Boring, huh. How about all three simultaneously? We could get take-out Chinese and go to Radio City.”

  “Now you’re talking, Buster!”

  “Champ,” he said, “some day you’re going to go too far.”

  “When I do,” she said, hugging him harder, “you’ll be the first to know.”

  By the tail end of that summer, Karp came to realize that the new regime was both worse and better than he had expected. Worse, because under Bloom, a brainy man with high political ambitions and no particular attachment to the notion of justice, the rule of numbers became absolute. As always, the rule of numbers meant rule by men who were comfortable with numbers, who believed that the neat boxes on their organization charts could somehow order and wash clean the screaming social chaos of crime in the City of New York. The lawyers called them data weenies.

  Wharton ruled these men. He set targets for what he called “throughput” and his troops broke these out into specific targets for each bureau and for each individual attorney. Since a certain number of cases came in each week, each assistant DA was obliged to move a certain number out, and would get dinged if he came up short. This meant that plea bargaining became virtually the only way by which cases were ever disposed. There were of course standards governing the acceptability of bargains, based on the initial charges and the circumstances of the crime. But the way it turned out was that nobody ever got dinged on failure to meet standards, just on failure to meet clearance targets.

  Trials virtually disappeared under this standards system, and so did the old guard of seasoned prosecutors who had grown up in the Garrahy era, the lawyers to whom trials were the center of their professional lives. One by one, and then in clumps, they left for private practice, the bench, the beach. Six weeks after taking office, Bloom dissolved the Homicide Bureau, thus abolishing the true church of the Garrahy religion. It was a natural consequence of the new order: silly to make a big deal about homicide, if a killing was just another occasion for a plea bargain, another felony clearance, another digit to keep the data weenies off your back. But oddly, in this unpromising situation Roger Karp flourished.