Reversible Error

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Karp got right to the point. Denton was not big on pleasantries in any case, and Karp had no stomach for them this afternoon.

  “Clay Fulton,” said Karp. “I’d like to know what he’s doing.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Karp paused and swallowed. He had worked with Denton closely over the years, and trusted him—so far. On the other hand, Denton was a cop, and one of the half-dozen most powerful men in the city’s criminal justice system. Karp was, in contrast, a bureau chief in what was but one of the five independent prosecutors’ offices operating in New York. There was just the one police department, and although legally the police were supposedly there to serve the district attorney, the reality was more complex.

  There was no way he could pressure Denton. He had used up all his chips just getting an immediate appointment with the C. of D. Karp determined now to lay out his problem as squarely as he could, and if Denton wanted to tell him to get lost, that was it.

  “Well, Chief,” Karp replied, “I have tried that. The problem is that my buddy Clay, who I have worked with on and off for nearly ten years, and who has always impressed me as the straightest shooter around, has apparently traded in his personality on a new model, something out of the KGB stockroom.

  “These dope-pusher homicides. He comes in, tells me you’re going to let him coordinate them as one big case. Fine. I don’t hear from him for a couple of weeks. I call him, I don’t get called back. Fine, too. He’s busy, it’s going slow—I can understand that.

  “Then I hear, like by accident, he’s arrested somebody in connection with the Garry thing. The guy is squirreled away in some pen, no contact with me, no charge even. Not fine, Chief. I go to a meeting this morning with some heavy hitters, the D.A. wants a task force to coordinate the operations on these hits with the cops and the community. There’s two cops there, playing hard ball for no reason I can see, and when I ask why Clay isn’t there, everybody looks at me like I just farted. Then everybody starts acting like Clay Fulton is in the tank on this, and I’m the only one in town who hasn’t got the message. Also not fine.

  “So I put it to you, out front, what the hell is going on?”

  Denton did not answer immediately. He looked at Karp for a long moment, and then picked up a yellow pencil from his desk and stared at it, held between his two hands, as if it were an oracle, as he rocked gently back and forth in his chair.

  At last he spoke. “What if I said you’re going to have to trust me on this one?”

  “I’d trust you. If I ever thought I couldn’t trust you, I’d move to Ramapo, New Jersey, and do divorces and real-estate closings. But that’s not the point. Something’s moving, out of Bloom’s office. Maybe it’s just typical smoke and mirrors, but I doubt it. The guys in that room—Reedy, Fane’s guy—don’t show up for a private meeting unless they have a serious interest in an issue. They might be on a platform or cut a ribbon for any kind of bullshit, but when they show up personally in a little room, something is going down.

  “If you tell me you’re in control on that end—OK. But somehow I doubt it. I’m involved, like it or not, and if I’m not helping you, there’s at least a chance that I’ll miss something important or actually screw something up.

  “Also, there’s Clay himself. Now, we both know that the only way to survive in this business, where everybody’s fucking one another as hard as they can, is to put together a bunch of people you trust. At least that’s what keeps me alive. Clay is one of my people that way, and I’m one of his, or at least I thought so. If he’s in trouble, I want to know about it. I’m not talking officially here, I’m talking personally.”

  Karp stopped talking and shrugged helplessly. That’s it, he thought, it’s my only card, and I played it. He hadn’t mentioned that if he was the only one who didn’t know what was going on, he couldn’t protect himself. Bloom could sucker him into something nasty and destroy him. He knew Denton liked him, but he doubted that such a consideration would be particularly telling to the chief of detectives.

  Denton considered Karp’s statement for a moment and then seemed to make a decision. He placed the pencil on his desk with a snap and rolled his chair forward, as if ready to issue orders.

  “Clay’s not in any trouble with the department. Far from it.” He paused and gave Karp one of his intense stares. “Let me ask you something. What’s the thing the department fears more than anything else?”

  “You mean corruption?”

  Denton grimaced in distaste and shook his head.

  “Corruption! Hell, no! Corruption has been part of police work since the beginning of time. We root it out when we can, but we basically accept it, like flat feet or hemorrhoids. Every so often we drop the ball and something like the Knapp Commission goes into action.

  “Look, I’ve been a cop for thirty-four years this October. There’s less corruption in the department now than there ever has been, but people are more worried about it than ever before. If it goes on like this much longer, it’s going to wreck the department, and then where will they be!

  “But it’s not corruption I’m talking about. That’s not what scares the bejesus out of me. Look, we’ve got over twenty-eight thousand men out there, almost all of them with little more than a high-school education, all of them armed to the teeth. A lot of them spend eight hours a day in hell. They see what crime does. They see what junk does. They see the mutts laugh in their faces day after day. They arrest some scumbag and he’s out on the street before they are.” Denton paused again, and seemed to sigh. He lowered his voice.

  “Did you ever think that one or two of them might crack, might decide to, say, abbreviate the judicial process? I’m talking Guatemala. Argentina. El Salvador.”

  As he grasped what Denton was saying, Karp felt a violent chill run through him, and he gritted his teeth to control it.

  “You … think it’s a rogue cop? Killing these pushers?”

  “Yeah. We’re pretty sure. Clay’s accumulated a lot of evidence. The victims all went with their killers willingly, or let them in without a hassle. We don’t have any witnesses who were close enough to make a definite ID, but we do have one person who saw one of the victims get into a car with two men, and his hands were cuffed behind him. At least one of the killers is a black man. That’s all we know.”

  “But couldn’t it be an impostor—somebody with fake ID?”

  “Very doubtful. The kind of victims we have are wise to that scam. If it was a thug doing it, the word would have spread around. No, it was somebody they knew by sight was a real cop. He came, he arrested them, they went quietly, and he killed them. Or he killed them when they opened the door.

  “The other thing that’s convincing is the pattern. These guys, the killers, are smart in ways that only a cop is smart. The hits are absolutely clean. They’re designed to have no apparent connection with one another, so that we’ll think they’re the result of a drug war.”

  Karp marshaled his thoughts against the horrifying scenario that Denton was calmly building for him. “What about this arrest in the Clarry killing? This Booth guy? How do you figure that?”

  “I think they’ve changed their pattern. Makes sense. We’re catching on, after all. This was an assassination in the back seat of a car, using a driver that the victim trusted. A Mafia-style hit. Once again, clouding the waters. It was only luck that we nailed Booth. And we got the gun too. Know where it was last seen? A police evidence locker. That was the clincher.”

  Something still didn’t jibe for Karp. “Chief, assuming you’re right, why haven’t you got five hundred guys on this thing? What is this business about not charging Booth?”

  “Think it through for yourself,” Denton replied. “You know what kind of hell we go through when a cop kills somebody in self-defense. Can you imagine what would happen if it came out that a bunch of cops were setting themselves up to be judge, jury, and executioner? Butch, the Knapp business left this department lying on it side, gasping for air. If
this came out, it would kill it dead. They’ll take our guns away. They’ll break up the force. It’ll be chaos.

  “When Fulton came to me with this, it struck me that in one way we were lucky that it was him that discovered it. He’s probably the best man on the force for the job. He’s a brilliant detective. He’s emotionally mature. He’s black and he knows Harlem. And one of our main suspects is in his unit.”

  “Who?”

  “You’re familiar with the King Cole Trio? Rough boys. That Dugman is from another age—a head breaker. It could be that they got too rough one day. Maybe they got to like it. Maybe just one of them is involved. We decided on a strategy. You heard the rumors that Fulton is dirty already? That’s by design. I want him close to the scumbags up there, in a way that you can’t get close unless you’re bent. I guarantee you somebody up there knows who’s doing these guys, and sooner or later one of them is going to cross paths with Fulton and let it drop.

  “The main thing, though, is that it meant that we didn’t have to tell anyone else. Fulton’s working alone.”

  “Completely alone?” Karp said in astonishment.

  “Completely. He came to me with his suspicions and I decided that full knowledge had to be limited to him and me. And now you.”

  Karp wrestled with the enormity of this statement. Then he said, “But, Chief, that means he’s got no backup. If some wacko asks him for a meet at three in the morning in a vacant lot, what’s he gonna do? Beg off?”

  “If he thinks it’s worth it, he’ll go,” said Denton. “There’s a hundred undercover cops on the force that take risks just as bad every day.”

  Karp had ready in his mind the argument that those cops had radios and people watching out for them and people they could at least talk to, but his reading of Denton’s expression convinced him that the chief of detectives had already written off Fulton’s safety as a necessary sacrifice to his plan.

  Karp changed tacks. He said, “But it’s all going to come out anyway, when it goes to court.”

  Denton looked at Karp silently, his face a mixture of sadness, anger, and massive determination. Then slowly he shook his head.

  Karp felt another chill, and this time his scalp prickled and sweat broke out on his palms and on his forehead. Karp ran a hand across his face and took a deep breath.

  “Chief, if you’re going to tell me that when Clay finds this guy he’s going to kill him, with your … blessing, then I don’t want to hear it. I can’t know it. Maybe I better go now.”

  “Stay where you are. I’m not at the point where I’m hiring assassins myself. Maybe I should, but I can’t. There’s a little mental hospital upstate that specializes in caring for the violent offspring of the very rich. Whoever this cop is, he’s a sick man, and he has to be taken care of. He’ll go there. Quietly, discreetly, and for a very long time. I’ve already made the arrangements. I’ve moved police funds into an account that will pay for it when the time comes. Illegally, of course. If this comes out, my own career will be ruined as well, not that it matters much in the scale of things.”

  Denton sighed and seemed to survey his office, with its awards and memorabilia, as if he were imagining what it would be like to be hauled out of it, to jail. When he resumed speaking, it was from behind a wan smile.

  “You know, I liked what you said about trusting people. I guess I operate the same way. But this thing … it’s something else. You and I have always gotten along pretty well. You’re smart and honest, and you know how to treat cops, which is rare down your street. I understand the kind of problems you have over there. That’s by way of saying we have a relationship that means something to me.

  “But let me say this. Nobody is to know anything about what we’ve just discussed. I gave my word to Clay that it was between him and me, and I’ve broken that word. I think for good reason, but he may not. So you can’t reveal your knowledge to him either, ever. And when I say nobody, I mean nobody. Not your best friend, not your girlfriend. Is that agreed?”

  Karp cleared his throat and said, “Yes.”

  “I’ll try to keep you up-to-date on what’s happening. I expect the same from you. And, Butch …”

  “Yes.”

  “I have to say this. If you tell anybody, I’ll find out about it, and if I do, I’d say a career in Jersey doing divorces will look pretty attractive to you.”

  SEVEN

  Karp dragged himself to Marlene’s loft that evening like a whipped dog. He had difficulty drawing a full breath, and was nearly winded when he arrived at the fifth-floor landing outside her door. The door was steel, painted glossy black, and he could make out a faint and distorted reflection in it of his own face.

  Faint and distorted was indeed how he felt, as if some internal glue had been dissolved and his inner parts were free to travel independently of the structure that had ordered them. Karp was, of course, no stranger to the petty stratagems and evasions that make up much of the life of any participant in an adversarial system of justice. But until the revelations in Denton’s office, and his own acquiescence to what the chief intended, he had always maintained a core of integrity, had never gone completely outside the law.

  Now he had. He was conspiring in the extralegal abduction and confinement of a multiple murderer in order to protect the police. He still couldn’t quite believe it. A structure of rationalization flew to his aid: he might not have to do anything after all. They might never find the guy. The guy might die. Fulton might die. Denton might die. Karp might die. Now, that looked good.

  Suddenly he missed Garrahy with a pain that was almost physical. If Garrahy were still alive, this never would have happened. He would have toughed it out. The criminal justice system would never have decayed to the point where an honest cop like Bill Denton would have had to consider something like this. Or maybe that was an illusion too; maybe everything had always been totally corrupt and he, Karp, was the last real sucker in the city.

  As from a distance he heard the sound of singing coming through the door, with an accompaniment of rattling noises. Marlene was singing a sad ballad, a sign that she was in a good mood. He pressed his ear to the cold black metal. It was “The Wagoner’s Lad”:

  Oh, sad is the fortune of all womankind,

  She’s always controlled, she’s always confined …

  She should only know, thought Karp, and pushed open the door. Marlene, dressed in her Japanese kimono and Nikes, was standing in the kitchen area stirring something in a pan. She saw Karp, flashed a smile, and sang, a little louder:

  Controlled by her parents, until she’s a wife,

  A slave to her husband the rest of her life.

  Karp flung his suit jacket and his folder on a chair and went over to her. The kiss tasted of garlic and sweat.

  “You’re supposed to shout, ‘Hi, honey, I’m home,’” said Marlene.

  “Stipulate it,” said Karp. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m cooking,” said Marlene. “You’re familiar with the process? See, you buy raw food in a store. Then you put it in a pan on a stove.” She tapped the gas range with her wooden spoon. “This is a stove.”

  “I think I’m beginning to understand,” said Karp. “It’s like a restaurant, except you have to wash the dishes yourself. But also, if you fondle the breasts of the attractive waitress, you don’t get into trouble.”

  At this, Karp slid his hand inside Marlene’s kimono and did just that. Her nipple hardened against his thumb, and the miracle spread down his arm and soothed him. He was always amazed at how strongly Marlene’s moods affected him. Her cheerful state seemed to pump sunlight into the darkest crevices of his soul. A minute ago, he was nearly suicidal; now he was cracking jokes and feeling both hungry and horny.

  Marlene looked back over her shoulder and said, “If you keep that up, you’ll never get to eat this terrific dinner. Go sit on the couch. This’ll be done in about two minutes.”

  A final tweak and Karp went. “What is it, by the way?” he asked.


  “It’s an exotic dish of my people, called, if I may translate, ‘lots of different stuff from the Italian deli, bought at the last minute and smooshed together with olive oil and garlic in a frying pan.’ It’s a traditional treat for special occasions.”

  “Is this a special occasion?”

  “Yes, in a way. Let me just turn this down and I’ll come over.”

  When she was settled next to Karp on the couch, she said, “Well, first of all, I had a really good day. The calendars went like clockwork all morning, and in the afternoon I put a really nasty strong-arm robber away for a year. I blew them out of the water, one-two-three.

  “But the best thing that happened, is this woman I’ve been working with at NYU called and said she’d finished computerizing all my rape files, and yeah, it looks like we had a serial rapist doing all these panty-hose jobs.”

  “Come again?”

  “I’ll tell you the whole story later. But I felt great. Then, at five o’clock sharp, I was waiting at the Leonard Street side for my honey babe to show up, so we could go up to the diamond district to pick out a ring …”

  Karp groaned and slapped his forehead. “Ah, shit, Marlene!”

  “No, wait! OK, I’m standing there, fuming, starting to hate you, getting depressed, thinking, ‘That son-of-a-bitch, how could he forget?’ and all the rest, when all of a sudden I had, like, this illumination. It was almost a voice in my head, like in those cartoons—you know—there’s a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other? Well, this was the angel.

  “And it was saying, look, if Karp missed this, he has to be in some serious shit, because you know he’s been wanting to buy this ring for a while, and it’s you who’ve been calling it off on one excuse or another because you’re still freaked out about the fact that you don’t have any ring finger to put it on, et cetera.

  “It made perfect sense to me, and so then I started thinking about you, and what you must be going through, whatever it was, and I decided that I wasn’t going to have a tantrum or collapse. Instead I was going to buy some wine and nice things, and make dinner for a change, and sit down and talk about it. What do you think of that?”