Reversible Error

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “That’s outrageous,’ cried Marlene. “I thought the goddamn things were supposed to make life easier!”

  Harris grinned. “Your first mistake. But really it’s not the machines, it’s the people. And let me say that anyway these guys in D.P. are not exactly the cream of the crop when it comes to programming the kind of stuff you want to do. I mean, they can do tweaks on big standardized COBOL programs, and keep the payroll going, but correlations, social-science packages, ANOVA—it’s out of their league.”

  “You sound like you know something about it. Could you—?”

  Harris shook his head strenuously, held up both hands, palms out, and affected an expression of horror. “No, no way!”

  Marlene said, “Tony, what, am I losing my charm? Wait, let me moisten my lips …”

  “Marlene: N. O. Look, this is a serious piece of work, weeks at least for one guy. And I don’t really know it. I mean, I made the stupid mistake of telling Karp that I knew something about computers from school and now he’s got me riding herd on the numbers, so we can keep the data weenies honest, but that doesn’t mean I could do a program like this right off the bat. I’d have to hit the books again—and then you still have the scheduling problem. Unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  “If your bureau chief went to data’s bureau chief and did a deal.”

  “My bureau … you mean Karp? And Wharton? Not in a zillion years. God! If Wharton ever thought that Karp was connected with this …”

  “Yeah, its priority might drop even further, like they’ll do it right after they solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. Which reminds me, maybe a university would be your best bet.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s an intrinsically interesting project; it might make a good dissertation—an analytical method of discovering serial rapists. Get a criminology professor up at John Jay or NYU involved, and you’re home-free. Universities got better computers than we do, and the people who can use them.”

  Marlene nodded without really listening. Tony said something about being sorry he couldn’t be of more help, and she thanked him vaguely and left.

  It was too much, another thing to think about, to set up, to marshal barely willing people into doing something that was so obviously important. Or maybe not … who, after all, gave a shit? Women got raped? Hey, baby, might as well relax and enjoy it, right? If somebody was going around town grabbing middle-class white guys and pulling their pants off and fucking them up the ass, then there’d be priority. The fucking cops would work on nothing else for a year! Thinking these and similar thoughts, Marlene stomped off to meet her lover, boss, and fiancé, Butch Karp.

  Horace Jordan, the pimp, called Slo Mo by his many friends, was not hard to find. Pimps are public figures. They must see and be seen, show their flash on the street, monitor and discipline their whores, and recruit new ones. The King Cole Trio found him at just past eleven that night, on the Deuce, the strip of 42nd Street between Sixth and Eighth avenues that is New York’s semiofficial sex, drug, and mugging emporium, standing under a sex-show marquee, talking with a black woman in tiny vinyl shorts and a pink bra.

  The conversation must have been gripping, because Slo Mo did not notice Jeffers and Maus until they had grabbed him, each by an elbow, and were carry-dragging him out to the curb, with the tips of his white Guccis just bobbing along the concrete.

  Without a word spoken, the two detectives threw him up against their unmarked Plymouth, patted him down, and emptied his pockets. “Hey,” Slo Mo said mildly, “what the fuck’s happening, man? I got no beef with you guys.” Jeffers opened the rear door of the car and tossed Slo Mo in like a bag of laundry.

  Art Dugman was sitting in the back seat of the car. Jeffers settled his huge form on the other side of Slo Mo and Maus drove off.

  “Hey, wha’ you doin’, man? Wha’ the fuck’s goin’ down? Hey …” said the pimp, to no response. After a while, he shut down, adjusted his gold chains and his lavender do rag, and waited philosophically for what might happen. Maus drove west on 42nd, south on Eleventh Avenue to West Street, where he pulled into an alley between two deserted warehouses.

  Dugman flicked on the dome light. “What do we got?” he asked Maus. Maus said, “A switchblade knife, a vial of a suspicious-looking white powder, keys, a roll of ill-gotten gains, looks like eight, nine hundred. It’s enough.”

  Slo Mo said, “What you talkin’ about ‘enough’? You ain’t got shit on me! Hey, what you doin’?”

  Jeffers had opened the door of the car and yanked the pimp out. He threw him against the alley wall. Maus followed them out. “Fuck this shit, man!” shouted Slo Mo. “Po-lice brutality. I wanna see my lawyer!”

  Jeffers spread his legs and stood in front of the pimp and hooked his thumbs in his belt, revealing his service revolver where it rested in its holster on his left hip. Slo Mo saw the gun and seemed to register his situation for the first time. His thin tan face turned ashy gray and his knees sagged. “No, man, I ain’t no dealer, man. Shit, I just got that stuff for the girls, man. I never … I never … oh, Jesus, fuckin’ shit … not me, man.”

  Jeffers said, “You got a girl for Larue Clarry last night.”

  Slo Mo looked at him blankly, his teeth set in a grimace of terror. Jeffers could see several gold teeth, one set with a small diamond, glittering in the faint light from the car lamp. He repeated the question. This time Slo Mo seemed overjoyed to answer. “Clarry, yeah, yeah, Haze … he like Haze.”

  “You sent Haze up to him last night.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does she look like?

  Slo Mo had recovered some of his initial cool. He straightened himself and said, “What she look like? What you think, man? She look like a damn ho.”

  “Redhead?”

  “Yeah, curly hair, short, little tits, nice ass. Wear that purple lipstick. Got real white skin.”

  “How old?”

  “Fuck I know, man. Old enough to fuck.”

  “Sixteen? Fifteen?”

  “Yo, aroun that. She fresh, whatever.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “What you want with her? You homicides. She ain’t killed no one. What, they bust you down to vice now?”

  Jeffers reached out and grabbed a handful of the gold chains that looped around the pimp’s neck and lifted him a half-inch clear of the ground. “Where she at, scumbag?” he asked softly.

  The pimp made a strangled reply, the address of a hotel on Eighth Avenue. Jeffers let go; the pimp staggered and fell against the alley wall. Maus got out of the car, took the switchblade out of his pocket, snapped the blade off and threw it away, crushed the glass vial of cocaine under his heel, dropped the ring of keys, pulled the rubber band off the roll of bills and tossed them into a puddle of greasy water. The two detectives entered their car. Dugman flicked the dome off and they drove off, leaving Slo Mo scrabbling in the alley after his drifting loot.

  “That was real cruel, Maus,” said Dugman.

  “That’s our motto, Dr. D.,” Maus replied. “Cruel, but fair. Shit, that little mutt was scared, wasn’t he, Mack? What the fuck did you say to him?”

  Jeffers shrugged. “Didn’t say shit. He just started whining that he wasn’t no dealer. But you’re right, I thought he was gonna wet his drawers.”

  Maus laughed. “Must have a guilty conscience, I can’t figure why. Where to, Mack?”

  Jeffers gave them the address. But the wretched little room, when they arrived, was empty. Back in the car, Dugman said, “OK, let’s knock off for tonight. We’ll pick her up— she ain’t gonna go off to college. Circulate the description and get the word out we want her.”

  They drove north, talking little, listening to the calls on the police radio. In the rear seat, Art Dugman sat thinking about why a tough little pimp like Slo Mo should have been so frightened of two police detectives, and why he should have been so desperate to convince them that he was not a drug dealer.

  Karp was no
t, to Marlene’s no great surprise, in his office (his “palatial office,” as she always referred to it). He never was, if he could avoid it. To Karp, the office meant paper, and irritating phone calls from upstairs, and the attentions of those few of his staff who still thought that hanging around Karp and flattering him was the way to get ahead in the D.A.’s office. In fact, the opposite was more nearly true.

  When Marlene asked Connie Trask where Karp was, she shrugged helplessly and rolled her eyes. Marlene knew that Karp was not in court, because it was already late afternoon, past the time when tradition declared that the judges of the city should be in their sedans on the way to the suburbs.

  Marlene did not feel up to chasing Karp through the warrens of the bureau’s staff, one of his favorite haunts. Instead, she took the elevator down to the main floor of the Criminal Courts Building, where she knew he would eventually show up. And it was a place where she could probably catch up with some of her own business.

  This zone was known to the inhabitants of the criminal justice system as the Streets of Calcutta. Even this late in the day, the corridor was crowded with the human material of justice: the accused, their defendants and prosecutors, the victims, the witnesses, friends and families of all of these, plus wandering cops and the various officers of court. Besides these the long hallway held a changing group of people for whom the courthouse represented a source of free entertainment and a refuge from the street: bag ladies, defectives, zanies, homeless families, retired lawyers, bureaucrats on the coop.

  In this medieval atmosphere was accomplished much of the real business of the building, the actual courts being used largely as a form of record-keeping. Since most of the people arrested for criminal offenses in New York are indigent and since the immense majority of such offenses are disposed of without trial, criminal justice in New York County is largely a business of conversations between assistant district attorneys and the men and women of the Legal Aid Society, who act as public defenders in the city’s courts.

  These people met throughout the day in the corridors and offices of Centre Street, which they made into a continuous legal bazaar. Things were especially bazaarish toward the end of the day, when the overworked representatives of both the accused and the People attempted to dump whatever they could of the next day’s business before the resumption of court in the morning, and the new intake of cases from the coming night’s criminal escapades.

  Marlene bought a cardboard cup of coffee from the snack bar and opened her stand in the hallway just outside its steamy portal. Word got around; Legal Aids with cases for which she was designated prosecutor found her and made their offers, which Marlene either accepted or rejected. Within broad limits, the rest of the ponderous system would support her in these decisions. The Legal Aids understood that too. Those who played hard-ass for their clients would be brought up short by their own management, who just as much as the ADA’s had to stay on the good side of the judges, who insisted above all else on the expeditious clearing of their calendars.

  So Marlene flipped through the case files with practiced speed, looking for the decisive detail. Was there serious violence, was this the second or the thirty-second arrest, did the cops seriously want the guy off the street, was the guy in jail, and for how long?

  Here was a kid, ripped off a tourist’s gold chain in front of Grand Central, arrested, in Rikers Island for six weeks. The tourist was back in Missouri. OK, go for a six-months-suspended, the weeks in Rikers were enough. Thus spake Marlene, playing judge and jury with the authority and aplomb of an Ottoman pasha.

  After an hour or so, the crowd thinned out. Marlene stepped into the main hallway. One of the advantages of having an enormous boyfriend, Marlene reflected, was that you could spot him at a mile: he was, in fact, standing at the opposite end of the block-long hallway. She waved to him, but he was locked in a Mutt-and-Jeff tableau with a short portly man in a pin-striped suit.

  As she approached, she heard Karp say, “In that case, I guess I’ll see you in court, Mr. Simoney.” The man opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, nodded curtly, and stalked away.

  As Marlene walked up, she was struck once again by the haggardness of Karp’s face, like that of a fighter about to lose a fifteen-round decision. There were circles under his eyes that hadn’t been there a few years ago, and lines carving down from the high cheekbones. He was looking Lincolnesque, in a Jewish sort of way. The pile of her own crap that she was about to lay on him drifted away, and she put on a happy face.

  Karp brightened when he saw her. “Hi, cutie,” he said. “Having a nice day?”

  “Assistant D.A.’s never have a nice day, as you well know,” replied Marlene grumpily. “I see you made Simoney mad again. He ran away without even saying hello, and he’s one of my favorite slime molds.”

  “He’s the defense for Lattimore.”

  “The pusher who shot his partner? Is there a problem? I thought you had a good confession.”

  “We do,” said Karp. “But while he was resisting arrest the cops bopped him a couple on the head. He came to, the cops were there, read him his rights, and he voluntarily confessed. Good procedure for a change. Simoney is now claiming the confession was offered when Lattimore was not in his right mind due to the severe beating he got. He’s waving Jackson-Denno at me.”

  “I thought the decision in Jackson was based on coercion—the guy was in pain, the cops wouldn’t give him water—like that.”

  “Yeah, it’s horseshit legally, but I still don’t love taking it to a jury. It’s too easy for the defense to make the case be about the injuries at the time of arrest and the validity of the confession, not about the murder. Also, I don’t have a good witness, the physical evidence is ambiguous, the vic was a scumbag … what I have is a confession with a cloud. Another ‘he did it, but …’ ”

  “So you’ll cop him?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I can’t think about it right now. Harris told me, by the way, that we just passed eight hundred homicides this year, and it’s only June. We’re gonna set another record.”

  “Calls for a celebration.”

  Karp grinned and rubbed his face. “Yeah, how about a good meal, a hot bath, a back rub, and a terrific piece of ass?”

  Marlene twitched her eyebrows. “Sounds great! Why don’t you go out and get all that, and I’ll meet you back at my place for a hand of rummy.”

  Karp laughed. “Fuck you, Ciampi.”

  She twined her arm through his. “Actually,” she said, “you took the words right out of my mouth.”

  FOUR

  The bar and dance hall known as Adam’s occupied a large brick-built, iron-fronted former warehouse at the foot of West Houston Street off Seventh Avenue. For the first hundred years of its existence it had stored the spices of the gorgeous East; on damp days the wooden floors still gave off a pale redolence of cinnamon and cloves. More recently, with the emergence of the district below Houston Street as a residential and artistic center, it had shifted to commodities that were only figuratively spicy: sex, romance, adventure, driven by flashing lights, the beat of the music of the moment—disco, salsa, punk, metal—and the availability of drugs.

  The establishment was one huge high-ceilinged room painted black and equipped with a stage for live acts, a raised platform supplied with chairs and small tables, a long bar and, at the center, a dance floor. Between the bar and the tables was a long narrow zone which, by custom, was occupied by masses of people of both sexes moving slowly to the music, drinks in hand. These announced by their presence in this zone their availability for an approach by a member of the opposite sex. The demographics of New York in this era dictated that most of the people in the meat market of Adam’s would be women.

  The rapist sat on a bar stool and allowed the parade to circulate slowly beneath his gaze. The image of a hawk sitting on a tree limb, waiting for the rabbits to venture within range was one that had occurred to him, and despite its triteness, it still amused. Choosing
his victim in this way filled him with delicious feelings of power and was quite the most amusing part of his whole enterprise. Adam’s was not his only haunt. He had been away from it for some time, making the broad circuit of the city’s singles bars, and was pleasantly surprised by the richness of the night’s pickings.

  He had particular standards. No cows, for one thing; no fleshy, smothering, maternal women. He liked small, compact women, women who looked like they could be tossed around by a man of moderate size. And no blonds. Blonds were dumb, he believed, and so many of them were phony. He thought hair dyeing was just that kind of disgusting treachery that was so typical of women in general, and which tended to justify anything he might care to do to them.

  So he was looking for small, dark, and lithe— and something else. There had to be a certain look, a high carriage, an aloofness. Anything that appeared to say “I’m too good for you”—or what he called privately the my-shit-doesn’t-stink look—was intensely attractive to him. He realized that it was comparatively rare in the singles bars he hunted. He often cruised the campuses of the city’s many colleges, and the theaters and museums, where women of this type were apt to be found in greater concentrations, feeding his fantasies, exciting himself almost beyond endurance.

  Yet he never approached any of these women in such places. Like a forest predator, he was uneasy away from his territory, where, sitting on his bar stool, he was in control. The women he desired were perhaps uncommon in this ambit, since what he liked, his true meat, was that sense of social competence, of inviolability and pride, that would typically lead a woman to avoid a place like Adam’s.

  But there were always a few. And he was patient. A disturbance on the periphery of the meat market attracted his attention. A woman was telling off a short, squat man with a monkey face and greasy black hair. The guy was trying to calm her down, but she was blowing him away. The rapist couldn’t hear the exact words she was using, but her expression, and his expression, and her tone of voice attested adequately to the force of her invective. The squat man threw up his hands, said something nasty, and disappeared into the crowd. The woman turned back to her drink at the bar.