No Lesser Plea

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Bloom gaped like a carp. “You. You’re threatening me. You’re threatening me?”

  “No, I’m not,” said Karp, turning away and humping toward the door. “I have no reason to threaten you. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  That evening Karp took a cab over to Bellevue. Three days a week he had physical therapy from Hector Delgado, ate dinner in the hospital cafeteria, and then went up to see Marlene Ciampi. He went after normal visiting hours, because during them a tide of relatives filled the room. Hector knew the nurse, so Karp got fifteen minutes alone after she had shooed the Ciampis onto the elevator.

  It was hard for Marlene to talk much, with her healing face. They were tapering her off the dope, but she still drifted in and out of sleep a lot. Tonight she was out cold. Karp sat in a wheelchair, held her hand and watched TV. This is what it will be like at Golden Age Ranch, when we’re old, he thought.

  It was a World War II movie. A sailor ran up to the star and said, “Captain, the Jap carrier is reported dead in the water and burning.” Karp liked the phrase. “Marlene,” he said softly, “you know what I did today? Don’t ask, but I’m dead in the water and burning.” He kissed her cheek and left. He felt light and clean, better than he had in months, better than he had since Garrahy died.

  And of course he didn’t get the bureau chief job. That went to a crony of Wharton’s named S. Mervin Spence. Which meant the scam in the Complaint Room was off, or at least scaled way down. Which meant that morale dropped a little lower among the best of Karp’s young lawyers. Who simply left. Kaplan, then Dellia, then half a dozen others. Which meant that the criminal justice system became a little more of a joke. Wharton’s administrative system was in high gear. He knew exactly what was happening in every part of the DA’s office. The problem was, nothing was happening. As V.T. said, “The criminal justice system is neither a system, nor just, but it is criminal.” When the conviction rate hit twenty-five percent Karp stopped charting it.

  Karp traded in his crutches for a cane and by Christmas he was walking unaided. He began once again to walk to and from the office when the streets weren’t slick. Toward the end of the winter he grew restless. I’m waiting, he thought. Waiting for what? For spring. For the girl to get better. Waiting for him, for Louis, to make his move.

  In March, nearly four years from the day he had murdered the Marchiones, Mandeville Louis reappeared in court. He had spent the fall and winter back in Matteawan, worrying and making plans. He kept telling himself time was on his side. Maybe the witness would die. Maybe Karp would die, or Elvis. He covered sheets of paper with carefully drawn plans, boxes and arrows, showing what would happen if this one did this and the other one did that. He stayed up late making one backup plan after another. Somehow they never seemed to make much sense in the morning and he would take his night’s work and tear it to shreds.

  He couldn’t make contact with the perfect Louis anymore. That was what hurt the most. He had to pretend so much, to be cheerful, and not act out, not give vent to his almost continuous rage. Dr. Dope didn’t like acting out. Louis’s life had, of course, been one long pretense, but then he had been the master, that was the point.

  He couldn’t get Karp out of his mind. Karp knew. That was the tumor eating his brain. He had tried to destroy Karp and failed. And Elvis was ratting him out. That hurt too, after all he had done for that little punk. And he couldn’t get to him. He took his yellow legal pad and wrote, “KARP KNOWS” and “ELVIS RATS” in big block letters. He drew lines connecting different letters together, trying to make sense out of it, trying for some combination that would bring back the old Louis.

  Around three one morning, eyes burning, hand aching from gripping the pencil, he knew he had found it. He wrote furiously, page after page. From time to time he laughed out loud. The next day, early, he called Leonard Sussman and told him to set a hearing date.

  When Karp saw Judge Yergin on the bench, he thought he had died and gone to heaven. He had been expecting Stein, and he didn’t think even Daniel Webster could have convinced the old Swerve—with his elaborate political connections to the psychiatric community— that one of its distinguished members was both a jerk and a crook. Yergin looked irritated and bored. He must have been dragged in to preside at the last minute. Karp felt he was on a roll.

  The players were in their familiar places: Louis looking docile, dull-skinned, and tired, flabby from four years of hospital food; Sussman, unchanging, immaculate, sitting rather farther away from his client than was usual. But this time there were more supporting characters. Dr. Edmund Stone, for one, had been dragged from his research and pinned to the stand, like one of his preparations, by Karp’s questions.

  “Doctor Stone,” Karp was saying, “I don’t understand. Are you able to tell this court today if Mandeville Louis is competent to stand trial?”

  “Yes, I am,” Stone answered. In fact, he barely remembered Louis. He had just done whatever Werner told him to do, and had signed off on whatever Werner told him to sign. Werner left him alone and didn’t ask too many questions about what experimental drugs Stone gave to indigent patients. It was a fair deal.

  “Good. I ask you again, Doctor. In your medical opinion, is the defendant, Mandeville Louis, competent and ready to stand trial?”

  Stone essayed a superior smile. “That would depend.”

  “Doctor, you just told me you could answer the question. Do so!”

  “The issue in a Ganser syndrome case, you must understand, is not the definition of ‘competence’ but of ‘ready.’ ”

  “Ready? That means right now, prepared, able to understand the charges made against him and aid in the preparation of his defense. So yes or no—which is it? Doctor.” Karp put as much heat and venom into this last thrust as he thought he could get away with— without being accused of harassing the witness.

  Stone was taken aback. He was used to more deference.

  “No, no. You are defining competency. I am well aware of what competency means. Mister Louis is a Ganser sufferer. That means the issue is not whether he is competent, but when he is competent. Mister Louis is competent to stand trial, except when he is actually standing trial.”

  Yergin coughed. “Would you repeat that?”

  “Certainly,” sad Stone with more confidence. “Mister Louis is a competent adult able to do anything that competent adults do, including understanding criminal charges and assisting a lawyer in his own defense. But once such a charge is made against Mister Louis, and he finds himself in a court of law about to be prosecuted for a crime, Mister Louis loses all semblance of competency.”

  “And how do you know that this loss of competence will occur when Mister Louis is tried?”

  “Because he has Ganser syndrome.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because of the manifestations of incompetence at trial, of course. It’s diagnostic. The principal effect of Ganser syndrome is that the sufferer becomes incompetent to stand trial, but only once the trial begins. Or, of course, if he were remanded for trial, it would be the same. The symptoms could evince themselves at any time. Naturally, we are still doing research on the etiology of this disease.”

  “Naturally,” said Yergin dryly. He turned to Sussman.

  “Look, Mister Sussman, answer me this. Is your client, in your opinion, presently competent to stand trial?”

  “Your Honor,” Sussman said, “it appears that my client is presently aware of this proceeding. My impression is borne out by the psychiatrists’ reports, which state that he is presently competent. Our concern is for what will happen once a trial actually begins.”

  “Then maybe we should go to trial and see what happens,” said Yergin. “I mean, if the man is competent right now, that’s all I need to hear. How does that sit with you, Mister Karp?”

  It sat very badly. Yergin obviously wanted to move this case, and he was playing into Louis’s hands. Without a formal finding that Louis was malingering and not suffering from
a purported Ganser syndrome, he could stage another bizarre episode at trial and go through another round in his game.

  “Your Honor, I think it is essential that the court make a finding as to whether the defendant does indeed suffer from so-called Ganser syndrome. This is the first time the conclusions of the Bellevue Hospital psychiatric staff have been challenged in this case. I think the court will agree that if it can be shown that Mister Louis is not in fact a sufferer from a mental disease that makes him incompetent to stand trial, the disposition of this case in the future will be quite different from what it would be if we simply remanded him at this time.”

  Yergin got the point. “Very well, Mister Karp. You may resume questioning.”

  Karp turned once more to Stone. “Doctor, one last question. As the defendant sits here now, is it your opinion that he is competent?”

  Stone said “Yes.” Karp sat down. The judge offered Stone to Sussman, who declined to cross-examine. The court broke for lunch, and at two Karp called Dr. Milton C. Werner to the stand.

  Werner liked testifying in court. His expression was benign, his carriage confident as Karp went through the preliminaries of identification and qualifications, and established that Werner agreed with Stone completely about Louis suffering from Ganser syndrome. Then Karp began to dig the pit.

  “Doctor Werner, is there anything that might possibly indicate that the defendant does not suffer from Ganser syndrome?”

  “No, sir, this is a classic case. In fact, I have just had a paper accepted for the journal, Forensic Psychiatry, that uses this very case as a—how would you put it?—a diagnostic paratype of this disorder.”

  “But surely, Doctor, some psychiatrists might disagree. Some psychiatrists might suspect on present evidence that Mister Louis is no more than a clever malingerer.”

  “Well they might, but if they did I would be glad to tell them they were wrong.” Werner chuckled at his little joke.

  “So you would expect unanimity on this diagnosis among competent experts in forensic psychiatry?”

  Werner checked for an instant before answering. “Um, yes, among competent experts, yes.”

  “And is this reflected in the medical records pertaining to the defendant, Mister Louis?”

  “Yes.”

  Karp walked over to his table and picked up a sheaf of folders. “I notice, Doctor, that each time Mister Louis was examined, in Nineteen-seventy, in Nineteen-seventy-three, and just recently, all the examining physicians concurred in the diagnosis. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  Karp handed him the file. “This is Mandeville Louis’s file as delivered by you, pursuant to the subpoena. Please look through it, and would you confirm for the court that it contains the reports of all the psychiatric examinations performed on Mister Louis during his several stays at Bellevue?”

  Werner thumbed carefully through the file. “Yes, they’re all here.”

  “There were three stays and two reports for each stay. Correct?”

  “Yes, that is correct.”

  “Now, Doctor, as one of the directors of Bellevue and as an official of the state of New York, are you conversant with the procedures under which competency is established under New York law?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “And, so you are aware that it is a violation of New York State law to suppress or conceal the results of a psychiatric evaluation?”

  “Yes, I am.” Werner was tense now. He had stopped his genial beaming after each question.

  Karp handed Werner a sheaf of papers from one of his folders.

  “Doctor Werner, would you tell the court what that document is?”

  Werner paled when he read the first page of the document.

  “Ah … it appears to be a psychiatric evaluation of Mandeville Louis.”

  “Very good, Doctor Werner. It is a psychiatric evaluation of Mandeville Louis, written by Doctor Emmanuel Perlsteiner of the Bellevue staff. But it was not included in any of your original reports to the court, nor was it included in the subpoenaed material. Nor did you choose to include Doctor Perlsteiner’s other two reports on Mister Louis. Doctor, is it not a fact that you consciously suppressed these reports because they did not confirm your diagnosis, because they were adamant in their conclusion that Mister Louis was, and is, a blatant malingerer?”

  “No, that’s not true, he … Doctor Perlsteiner is, well, he actually hasn’t kept abreast of modern developments in the field, and as an elderly man, he …”

  Werner’s voice faded. Karp thought, Thank you, thank you. An invidious dig at your colleague’s credentials is precisely what I wanted. You’ve broken the White Wall, you asshole, and now your credentials are up for grabs, and so are Bellevue’s, not to mention the integrity of your system.

  Karp lifted his folders toward the bench. “Your Honor, I would like to present as evidence these psychiatric evaluative reports on the defendant, written by Doctor Emmanuel Perlsteiner. Doctor Perlsteiner is quite certain that Mister Louis is completely sane.”

  Yergin’s brow looked like corrugated cardboard. “Mister Karp, do you mean to tell me that we don’t have those reports?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. Every year since his first evaluation, Mandeville Louis was examined by Doctor Stone, Doctor Perlsteiner, and Doctor Werner. But only the reports by Doctors Stone and Werner were sent to the court, for obvious reasons. This court never knew about the dissenting reports.”

  From the stand, Werner tried his last shot, a desperate one.

  “Your Honor, if I may. It seems to me that this Mister Karp is presuming to make judgments about the competency of psychiatric staff that lie outside his purview. I must strenuously object on behalf of the Bellevue staff.”

  Yergin turned his massive head slowly toward Werner and regarded him as an alligator might a puppy. “I observe your objection, sir. I do not accept it. It is for this court to obtain the required psychiatric advice, and on the present evidence in this case, I believe that I no longer wish to obtain it from you or your staff at Bellevue Hospital. As for you, sir, I would suggest that as of now you concern yourself not with competency of medical advice, but with competency of legal advice, should the District Attorney’s Office wish to bring a charge of perjury against you.”

  “Good for Yergin!” said Marlene from her bed. “What happened then? Yomm! Oh, gorgeous!”

  Karp was sitting in Marlene’s room with a cardboard bucket of half-shell oysters picked up from a fish store on First Avenue. Marlene’s face was still partially bandaged, but she was off the dope and feeling more her old self. Every couple of sentences, Karp would season an oyster and slide it into her mouth. It was the sexiest thing either of them had done in months.

  “Oh, it was quick work after that. He recessed and asked us for the names of two fresh shrinks. We got him two guys from Downstate Medical Center. After they had finished laughing themselves silly over Ganser syndrome, they told the judge Louis was as competent as he was, or words to that effect.”

  “So he’s remanded for trial?”

  “You bet. They’re selecting the jury now.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think open and shut. Elvis and the physical evidence will bury him. On the other hand, I got a funny call this afternoon. From Sussman. He said, quote, ‘Mister Louis would like to see you about a deal.’ Unquote. He wouldn’t say what it was, wouldn’t say anything, in fact. Very uncharacteristic.”

  “Ah, piss on him. He just knows he’s beat. By a better man. Oyster me again, big boy.”

  To Karp’s surprise, when he arrived at the Tombs the next morning, Louis seemed positively glad to see him. His eyes glittered and he had an obsequious smile on his face. Sussman sat at the other end of the scarred table and merely nodded as Karp entered the interview room.

  Karp examined Louis coldly. “OK, Louis, your lawyer said you wanted to see me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I did. Hey, sit down, sit down. Look, Karp, let’s cut out this jive, you know?
I mean we understand each other, right? We’re the same kind, you and me. I mean, I could, you know, work with somebody like you, you dig?”

  Louis brandished a fat wad of yellow legal paper, thickly covered with writing. “Look, I got it all worked out. It can’t miss. See, the deal is, we do franchises, but not just one thing, see. We franchise everything! It’s a kind of service—somebody got a product they want to franchise, they come to us, we set it up, turn it over to them. And, look, here’s the best part, we take a fee, plus, we get royalties on the franchises. Or maybe, we take over some of the spots. I, we, could work it out …”

  “Louis, what are you talking about? I thought you wanted to deal.” Karp looked at Sussman, who merely shrugged and lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

  “Yeah, yeah, this is the deal. It’s hot to trot, man. Man, I figure you to be, ah, Mister Outside, I’ll be Mister Inside. We’ll have us a big office with classy secretaries, you know, fine foxes. And, like, we’ll have a jet. A corporate jet. A corporate jet, man.”

  Karp stood up. He addressed Sussman. “This won’t work, Lennie. It’s sneaky, but I think you’ve played your hand on this line.”

  Sussman raised his palm. “Karp, cross my heart, this is all him. I have no idea what he’s up to.”

  Louis was shuffling through his papers. “Hey, look at this, I got a drawing of the corporate jet. It’s got a what d’ya call it, a logo, on it. Hey, Karp, what do you think, sharp, right? Hey, Karp, where you going?”

  “See you later, Louis,” said Karp, reaching for the door.

  Louis got up and followed him. “Hey, Karp, let’s, you know, have lunch. We got to make plans.”

  Karp turned and glared down at Louis. The man looked bad, that was a fact. His glasses were dirty, and there was a dried crust around his lips. His tan face was blotched and puffy and his hair looked greasy.