Reversible Error

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Fulton said, “Looks like the shooter took off in a hurry. Something must have spooked him. Did the RMP see anything?”

  “Didn’t see shit. Nobody saw shit. We did a canvass the next morning …”

  “Nobody heard the shots?”

  “No. But I don’t think he was popped there.”

  “I thought you said he got it in the car.”

  “Yeah, yeah, in the car, but not at the place—under the FDR.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The blood. From his face—it was streaked back along the side of his head, like when it rains against the side windows of a car and the speed of the car drags it backwards. And there was a big mass of clotted blood piled up against where the deck behind the back seat meets the back window. They shot him somewhere else and drove him there and dumped him. Took all his stuff too—wallet, jewelry. Look like a deal gone bad or a ripoff. Tricky fuckers, whoever.”

  Fulton worried his mustache with his lower teeth. “Yeah, but not tricky enough, this time. What about his place?”

  Dugman looked across the room at a stocky white man in a brown nylon jacket, gray work pants, and a blue plaid shirt. The man was in his early thirties and had a lumpy face with a strong jaw. The dark eyes were slightly too close together, but his mouth was wide and humorous. His dirty-blond hair was worn as long as the police department then allowed; the picture was redneck, working stiff, union-card-carrying, not a bright light. It was a picture he cultivated. His name was Lanny Maus, and he had been a detective-third for a little over ten years.

  Maus was leaning backward in his chair against the scarred police-station-green walls and had his feet propped up on his desk. He wore the kind of heavy tan leather shoes favored by construction workers. He removed the wooden match on which he had been sucking and consulted his own little book.

  “We tossed the place at five-ten P.M. on the night of. Ton of coke, some smack, pills. Could he have been a dope dealer? Man had a gun, a nice nine, didn’t take it with him. Glass on the table in the living room, fresh prints, not Clarry’s. We’re checking that out.

  “Moving to the bedroom, we find signs of recent sexual activity. Clarry apparently got one last piece of ass before he checked out. Bed sheets gave us head hair, female, Caucasian, dyed red, pussy hair ditto, not dyed, brown. She wears purple lip gloss, assuming the Kleenex in the wastebasket belongs to her. That’s about it, except a lady in a front apartment said she thought she saw two men get into a big black car parked in front of the building and drive off a little past twelve.”

  Fulton acknowledged the report with a nod and said, “Ok, the girl left, then Clarry left with somebody who drove him someplace and shot him and drove the car with the body in it under the highway, and left on foot.” He stood up and started pacing back and forth in front of the three men.

  “This is looking good. This is the first time we got anything on these killings. We need that girl.”

  Maus cleared his throat. “Loo, I’d like to volunteer to go up to every redhead in the city and ask them what color is their snatch. I’d have to verify their answer, of course.”

  Fulton gave him a look. The fourth man in the room, who had been silent up to now, said in a voice so deep and rumbling that it was like the noise made by a piece of heavy machinery, “Clarry like them young.”

  They all turned toward him. Detective Third Class Mack Jeffers was a very black and extremely large man, was, in fact, as large as it is possible to be and still be a member of the police force in New York. He was just under the six-foot-seven limit and weighed over 285 pounds. He was the youngest member of the Trio, not yet thirty, and had made detective with record speed because, it was said, they had run out of blue cloth. He was taciturn, patient, and like many big men, friendly and even-tempered.

  “He got his girls from Slo Mo,” Jeffers continued. “You know Slo Mo, Art?”

  “Yeah, he pimps down on the Deuce. Picks the moppets up at the Port Authority. OK, we’ll check it out.”

  Fulton said, “Good, that’s a start. Now, on these other dope-dealer hits, we’re taking all of them over.”

  Groans all around. Dugman said, “Loo, what the damn hell! We don’t pull enough murders in Harlem? You got to drag in stale fucked-up cases from all round town?”

  Fulton set his jaw. “Can it, guys! This is real, and this is big, and I want complete control of it all. I want every one of those case files squeezed until the juice comes out. There’s a pattern here, and you’re gonna find it. That’s all!”

  He turned and strode into his private office, slamming the door behind him.

  The three detectives looked at one another, their expressions exhibiting mixed feelings of disbelief, annoyance, resignation—the standard cop expressions. But there was also the beginning of something else, a kind of fascination, the first faint scent of prey in the air. The King Cole Trio hated mysteries too.

  THREE

  “What did he do then?” asked Marlene Ciampi, trying to keep the weariness out of her voice as she moved through yet another rape interview. This victim—she glanced down at the name … Paula Rosenfeld—was shut down, reciting the facts of her recent violation as if she were reading off the periodic table. You got them like that; you also got the one who couldn’t stop shaking, and the weepers, and the cursers. Those were just the ones who came in. Marlene suspected that the majority of the raped of New York were in another class entirely—the no-shows, the ones who turned off the memory, told no one, denied it happened, took a long bath and tried to get on with life.

  Rosenfeld shrugged and said, “He didn’t do anything. He got off me, pulled on his pants, and went out.”

  “He didn’t say anything to you?” The woman thought for a moment. Marlene observed the signs of grief and stress ooze subtly onto her face. It was a pretty little face— short dark hair, small even features, big brown eyes that would have looked better without the dark circles beneath them. A good figure too, small and slim, not unlike Marlene’s own, but muffled by a shapeless black sweater and jeans. After a while she cleared her throat and said, “Yes, he did say something. He smiled and waved and said, ‘Well, be seeing you.’”

  Marlene wrote it down in the appropriate space on her five-by-eight index card, the space for “vocalizations-post” Marlene had designed the card herself and had paid for the two rubber stamps that printed the categories on the front and the back of each card. The card was supposed to help you to set down in an orderly way all the information about a rape: about the victim, about the setting (place, time of day, phase of moon), about the rapist. There was a space marked “signatures.” Marlene tapped her pencil on this spot and reread what she had written there.

  “About the panty hose—you said he wrapped it around your neck. Did you think he was going to strangle you?”

  The woman shook her head. “No, it wasn’t like that. He had this big knife, you know? He didn’t need anything else. No, he just draped it around my neck and sort of played with it while he … you know.”

  Marlene knew. She nodded, made a note, and looked up brightly. “Well, Ms. Rosenfeld, I’d like to thank you for coming in. We’ll get in touch with you if we need you again, when we make an arrest.”

  The woman looked at her dully. “They’re not even going to look for him, are they?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody. But I could just tell—the cops who interviewed me after—they thought it was, like, an argument on a date or something. It got out of hand, no big thing. They kept asking me if I was going to press charges.”

  Marlene sighed, leaned back in her chair, and stuck her pencil in her hair. “OK, look—from the point of view of the law and law enforcement, rape is an unusual crime because almost always the only witness is the victim. We can have evidence of the sex taking place, but whether it’s rape or not is a question of belief. The state legislature changed the rape law last year, so you no longer need independent corroboration of the crime, but you do
need evidence that force was used and consent not given.

  “So the cops look for certain things—was it a stranger, was there breaking and entering, was there beating of the victim? Places—in a back alley is good, a parking garage, a park. Also they look at the social stuff. Cops like big differences in the ages. The eighteen-year-old and the grandmother, or the forty-year-old guy and the twelve-year-old girl.

  “And, I’m sorry to say, they also like black on white, although that’s a lot rarer than most people believe. In any case, they like a middle-class victim. What they definitely do not like is when it takes place in the woman’s bedroom, and she let him in and she knew the guy. Like in your case, a guy she met in a bar.”

  “You don’t believe me either!” the woman said in a small voice, accepting it.

  “No!” Marlene nearly shouted, and the woman jumped. “I do believe you. But that’s not what matters. What matters is do we have a case.” She tapped her stack of five-by-eights. “That’s what these cards are for. If he did it to you, he did it or will do it to other people, and probably in the same way. We establish there’s a pattern, a serial thing, it gets the cops interested. They put more energy into it. Also, we have a pattern that makes it a lot easier to convict, and to get a decent sentence when we do.

  “I know the system sucks, but it’s the system. I’ve got to play in it the best I can. But believe me, I understand what you’re going through …”

  At this, the other woman’s face, until then a frozen mask, twisted into a hostile grimace. “You do?” she spat. “Why? Did you get raped too?”

  Marlene’s stomach churned. She understood why many of the women she interviewed took out their rage on her. She was available, and the rapist wasn’t, but it didn’t make it feel any better.

  She took a slow breath, folded her hands on her desk, looked Paula Rosenfeld straight in the eye, and said, “Actually, Ms. Rosenfeld, I believe I can sympathize with your situation. Not too long ago I was drugged and kidnapped by a bunch of crazed satanists, stripped naked and presented as a toy to a mentally defective child murderer, given the starring role in a variety of depraved rituals, during which I was masturbated upon by a substantial number of men and had various of my personal orifices penetrated by demonic instruments wielded by my charming hostess. So yes, I believe I can sympathize with your situation.”

  The other woman’s eyes had gone wide and her jaw dropped. “Oh, my God! You’re that one! It was on TV.”

  “Yes, dear, I’m that one—my fifteen minutes of fame.”

  Pause. Marlene waited for what she knew was coming. “You killed that guy.”

  Marlene nodded. “Yes, I did. He was going to shoot a couple of friends of mine, had shot one of them already, so I killed him.”

  “I’d like a shot at that bastard too,” the woman said bitterly.

  “Yes, you would. But it’s no fun killing somebody. It doesn’t take away the violation.” Marlene gestured widely toward the four corners of her tiny office. “This. All of this, the courts, the system, is supposed to do all that for you. It doesn’t, but we keep plugging anyway. What else can we do?”

  Paula Rosenfeld, rape victim, had no answer to this question, and she wound up the interview and left shortly afterward.

  Marlene lit a Marlboro and watched the smoke eddy up to the ceiling high above. The office was an architectural oddity, having been constructed out of a dog-leg end of a hall corridor on the sixth floor of the Criminal Courts Building. Its height was therefore nearly twice its other dimensions, so that Marlene worked in what was effectively the bottom of a narrow shaft.

  Office space was scarce in this era of New York’s perpetual losing battle against crime. The building at 100 Centre Street had been constructed in the late thirties, a period when the poor knew their place, organized crime exerted a kind of discipline on criminal activity, and the police were able to apply such deterrence and punishment as they thought necessary without having to bother the courts: a golden age and long gone.

  Now the system was operating at a level ten times higher than it was designed for and, when this was added to the normal tendency of bureaucracies to bloat with time, it meant that the building was bursting at the seams with the varied servitors of justice.

  Given the strictures of civil service, a pleasant office is one of the few real gifts in the hands of an elected official like the D.A.; the D. A. did not incline to shower gifts upon Karp, and thus office space was especially scarce for his minions, among whom Marlene was, naturally, more than prominent, being, as was known, Karp’s main squeeze.

  Marlene didn’t mind the office at all; it had zero status, which obviated the need to protect it from the more ambitious; it was out of the way, so that people had to make a special effort to bother her; and while it had no ventilation, it had plenty of room for cigarette smoke in its upper regions.

  The alternative was accepting a cubicle in a big office bay, with only a head-high glass partition separating one from one’s neighbor, who was likely to be a health fascist who would cough pointedly whenever one lit up.

  Marlene put the card she had just filled out in its alphabetical place in one of her long boxes. Something about this particular case niggled at her mind, some pattern. . . . She rubbed her temples, massaging them to stimulate greater brain power, a trick of hers since schoolgirl days. It had worked for Latin declensions and principal products of distant lands; but no longer. Her brain sat inert. She was sinking into bovine placidity, the old sharpness just a frustrating memory. She was three months gone and the baby was obviously starting to leach vital brain material from her very skull.

  No, that couldn’t be true! Plenty of women had borne children without any diminution of their mental powers, or sacrifice of career opportunities, or self-respect.

  “Name three,” said a voice in her head, the prosecuting attorney. It was a real voice and not Marlene’s own, which caused her no little wonder; in fact, she admired its tone of affable contempt, and wished that she were able to summon it up herself in court. She was even able to visualize him, as composed partly of the Daumier print of an advocate that had hung in the anteroom of one of her law professors at Yale, jowly and lidded of eye; partly of that law professor himself, the son-of-a-bitch, and partly, just a hint, of her dear intended, Karp.

  “Marie Curie,” said Marlene out loud, whipping mentally through the pages of her NOW calendar, “umm, Rebecca West, and writers, lots of women writers—Anne Tyler, Margaret Drabble …”

  “Oh?” said the prosecuting attorney. “And are you intending to become a writer? If so, you’d better hustle and establish your reputation in the next five months, so you can live on your fat royalties and hire a nanny. But you’re not a writer, are you, Miss Ciampi? You’re an assistant D.A. with $234.12 in your bank account and a fifth-floor walk-up loft in an industrial neighborhood. How do you intend to keep working once the baby comes?”

  “I’ll think of something,” said Marlene, without conviction.

  “Will you, now? Like what? Carrying a baby on your back while you run from courtroom to courtroom or out to crime scenes? Not likely! No, your career, such as it is, is over. It’s diapers and the soaps on TV, and waiting for him to say, ‘Hi, honey, I’m home!’ You’ll be dependent.”

  This last word seemed to reverberate in the courtroom of Marlene’s mind like a cheap echo effect in a horror movie. Dependent. The jury in her mind, twelve aged Italian women in black, with cameo pins, rubbed their mustaches and nodded. It served her right, the crazy girl, what scandal … che pazza ragazz’. Che vergogna!”

  This was too much. Marlene jumped to her feet, rapping her knees painfully against the bottom of her desk. The flash of agony cleared the court in her head. She grabbed her bag and an armload of current-case jackets and limped out of her office toward the hall to where the Criminal Courts Bureau had one of its main blocks of cubicles for junior staff.

  Tony Harris was in his cubicle, on the phone. He was a gangly and engag
ing youth in his mid-twenties, with bright blue eyes, bad teeth, and no haircut. Seeing Marlene, he smiled and motioned with a helpless gesture to the only other chair in the tiny space, which was filled to overflowing with case jackets and stacks of green-and-white computer printouts. Marlene did not, in any event, wish to sit. She paced and smoked while Harris managed to convince a reluctant witness to appear in court for the third time.

  When he finished, Marlene asked him, without preamble, “Will they do it?”

  “What, your rape case correlations? Yeah, Data Processing farted around about it for a while, but I finally got them to admit it was a legit run.”

  Marlene brightened. “They’ll do it? Great! When can I get the results?”

  Harris crinkled his face. “That’s the problem, Marlene—the when part. It’s got—your job’s got—no priority; it comes after the bookkeeping, the trial schedules, the rosters, the clearance stats, everything …”

  “So, when?” Marlene snapped.

  “Months. Maybe three, maybe four … and it can get bumped by nearly anything.”

  “But it’s important!” Marlene wailed, and ran a hand through her thick tresses. “We’re talking about finding criminal patterns, catching multiple rapists. And they’re worried about bookkeeping?”

  “Yeah, but bookkeeping is what they do, Marlene. Maybe you’d have better luck with the cops.”

  “Oh, sure! I tried that already. They want money to do the programming. Then maybe they’ll think about it, the fuckers! I can’t fucking believe this! How much time could it take? I thought computers worked like in no time at all.”

  Harris coughed and waved his hand against the smoke cloud. “Yeah, they do when they run,” he explained, “but you got to put a lot of time in up-front to tell them what to run and make it all work. You would have to keypunch all those cards, for starters. Then you’d have to write the program, debug it, make your run, fuck with it some more, and run it again until it was right. Then, if you had any more questions, based on what you learned from the first run, you’d have to write a mod and then go back to the end of the line and wait again.”